Communities Dominate Brands

Bloodbath News: LG reports final 2014 number, also outside Top 10 we have Lumia number, and some thoughts about Samsung Q4 (without their number). (Updated)

Yeah the final quarterly numbers are now rolling in. First up, we have the first of the big 3 analyst houses reporting its final smartphone sales numbers (for Q4 and for full year 2014). My regular readers know that I always calculate my number as the average of the totals from those 3 (used to be 4) houses, and from that I then plug in the known individual manufacturer numbers and estimate the remainder to fit best available info. So yes. Strategy Analytics was first out of the box, they counted full year 2014 to have hit 1,283.5 million ie 1.28 Billion smartphones sold worldwide. For Q4 their number is 380.1M (and yes, those who are playing along at home, your spreadsheet is correct. Strategy Analytics have found some more smartphones this year they didn't report before, about 3 million more.. yeah, me too. Wish they'd tell us which quarter they found them haha). Ok lets hope we get Canalys and IDC to report their numbers soon as well.

UPDATE PART 1: shortly after I posted this, IDC also released their final count. Total market 1.3B for 2014, Q4 sales 375.2M smartphones (Sammy number added to below)

LG FINAL 2014

We have the official number from LG for the full year. They shipped 59.1 million smartphones. LG hasn't given us their quarterly numbers regularly so its been guesstimates based on the - ahem - guesstimates by the analyst houses and other reported news so based on what I had for Q3, LG's Q4 would be down to 15.5M (down 8% from 16.8M in Q3). We should be cautious, the Q3 number was not solid, BUT, this would be consistent with Samsung reporting declining unit sales from Q3 to Q4 and we know Apple iPhone gains were not from the ultra-cheap rivals, it will be from the premium name brands - like Sammy and LG. But yes, I currently am modeling 15.5M for LG for Q4 but will go still revisit their Q3 and Q2 to see if I have to adjust those perhaps. We know the full year total, so if I reduce one of the earlier quarters, that would mean larger number for Q4. But yes, in Q4 in this preliminary share, LG has a market share down to 4.1% (from 5.2% in Q3).

Note that LG is reporting profits in its handset business, so this is a healthy rival, has been profitable now three quarters in a row. And of its migration from dumbphones to smartphones, LG is about on par with Samsung, as 75% of its annual handset shipments were now smartphones. Note for the global industry the migration is only about 67% so this is better than industry transition (or say, Microsoft-Nokia who still linger in last place with only 20% of their handset production shifted to smartphones in Q4, far less for the full year haha). So LG is holding steady at 4.7% annual market share and for 9 months have been profitable. I think its now time for LG to ramp up the competition and start to grow, show us what you can do.

If you are curious about where will LG end up on the annual Top 10 list, we know the top 4 positions are already taken, and at least one Top 10 rival does have bigger sales than LG out of the bottom 6. So LG can best hope for 6th ranking but also they won't be 10th or 9th (fight between ZTE and Sony). Depending on final Coolpad and TCL numbers, LG will finish between 6th, 7th and 8th rank, very likely 6th.

MICROSOFT LUMIA (NOKIA)

So then outside the Top 10 we had Lumia number at 10.5M (I had expected 12M if you remember my posting when the shock news came that only 1 in 3 Lumia handsets that had been shipped, had ever been activated). There I clearly said my Q4 number for 2014 was half-quarter number (6M) so I had expected Nokia-Microsoft to have its normal big Christmas quarter but the performance was truly lame. The Microsoft 'Nokia' brand of dumbphones is being ramped down rapidly, they declined total handset sales from 52.2 million units in Q3 to 50.2 million in Q4 (decline 4% when usually this is hot Nokia sales quarter). That included a decline of 3.2 million units of dumbphones for a gain of only 1.2 million more smartphones. Still this pattern continues with Lumia and Windows, that Nokia/Microsoft cannot achieve even a 1-to-1 conversion from dumbphones to smartphones, Microsoft is bleeding nearly 2 customers out, for every 1 customer migrated to Windows. Back before Stephen Elop wrecked Nokia's handset business juggernaut, that migration was consistently better than 1-to-1 and yes, irony of ironies that was with the 'obsolete' Symbian OS. (and every single quarter that was done profitably). Can you see how dead Windows Phone OS is? It is performing dramatically worse than SYMBIAN did haha. After all those 'glorious' updates to the OS from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 6, to Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8. And its still poison today.

Yes, the Lumia unit still generates a loss over at Microsoft and the 'news' that Lumia set a record is only bogus Microbrain propaganda, as the Nokia smartphone unit has not RECOVERED yet even to the sad sales levels it had as recently as Q1 of 2012 (when Nokia sold 11.9 million smartphones) and the sad Lumia recovery is far far from Nokia's peak of 28.3 million in Q4 of 2010 when Nokia was more than twice the size of the iPhone, had 29% market share and was four times the size of Samsung, and reported Nokia record profits in its smartphone unit. Incidentially since Lumia was launched, it has not produced one quarter of a profit. And yes, one in three Lumia units that has shipped from the factory to the retail channel, has never been activated. So yeah. That is a dead OS right there, Windows. No wonder all handset makers and developers are bailing out from the OS. Even Sony's Vaio unit which was supposed to launch Windows smartphones alongslide the Vaio laptops that run on Windows, no, they are now launching on Android instead. This when Vaio is an independent company now, not part of Sony. They examined Windows - even as its 'synergies' with the Vaio laptops - and they will launch Android instead. But Lumia yes it finished outside the Top 10 for year 2014 with a market share of about 2.7% (down AGAIN, from the pitiful 3.1% it held a year ago). Microsoft taking over from the mess Elop created at Nokia did not revive the Lumia unit. It is dead.

ABOUT SAMSUNG DECLINE

So I can't analyze Samsung numbers yet because Sammy didn't give their number for Q4 or for the full year 2014. We did hear, however, that their unit sales were DOWN in the Christmas period. That is VERY bad news. They were at about 78.5 million in Q3 so we can expect Samsung to be in the range of say 70M - 77M now, and that puts it squarely in the sights of the iPhone - for total smartphone sales lead in a quarter. Yes this is Apple's spike-quarter after their new model launch but still. Even if it is only one quarter, this is quite a shock. And we don't know the exact number (we may hear it at some point but probably not. We will use the average of the Samsung numbers as reported by the big analyst houses). But Samsung did say their quarter-on-quarter unit sales for 'smartphones and tablets' was down. The tablet business is not big enough to account for it, this is mostly down on the smartphone side. What is curious, however, is that Samsung also said their Note 3 phabet sales were strong and helped boost Samsung average sales price up. So while Apple launched the iPhone 6 series phablets, those apparently didn't bite (heavily) into Sammy's phablet sales. Maybe it was more Apple's exiting customer base who rushed to get the large-screen iPhones. And if so, Sammy's damage was done probably more on the bottom end of the scale. There we do see a heavily surging Huawei who has had a banner quarter (and perfectly timed for its home market, China). Xiaomi did not eat Samsung's Christmas dinner, as Xiaomi sales are down from Q3.

I wish we had more numbers, haha, but it does seem, that as Note 3 sales are still strong, the iPhone 6 Plus did not eat into Samsung phablet business. But as Samsung didn't say its Galaxy S5 flagship was strong (and it is after all, an 11 month old flagship) that is probably at the top end where Samsung now took a big hit from the iPhone 6. Meanwhile, at the bottom end, it is definitely not Xiaomi who is beating Sammy (only in China, but even there Xiaomi sales are down from Q3) no, that is led by Huawei with a strong surge currently. Meanwhile we heard from Huawei that they could grow even more at the bottom end but want to move upscale where bigger profits are available. And a shift in Samsung flagship Galaxy S4 to phablet Note 3 sales would not shift the Average Sales Price upwards, it would keep ASP flat. What is needed is for low-end phones to suffer and shift that balance more to upscale phones. So Samsung's big damage came at the bottom end, primarily to Huawei. But also ZTE and Lumia are up in the low-cost smartphone sector. Meanwhile other premium brand smartphones seem to also take a hit from Apple's Christmas spike - LG is down from Q3 and Sony previously already complained that they will downgrade their guidance for full year smartphone shipments. And for its impact of scale similar to Lumia haha, Blackberry was also down at the premium price end.

Thats kind of how I read it, where the big threats are and who is gaining and who is in trouble. And back to that iPhone spike - once again, this was a weak jump in the best quarter that Apple can have any year. It didn't even reach the levels Apple has had in past Christmas quarters for iPhone spike sales. Now Apple will see again the declining quarterly market share until in September we see the next iPhone. And as we've already heard from Huawei and Xiaomi they are rushing out their 'iPhone killers'. Samsung is definitely sharpening their knives for the fight this summer with the next flagship Galaxy. LG is now pretty healthy and preparing their next round. The battle will be joined and Apple's Christmas free ride is now over. But Sammy Sammy Sammy. They are now very much vulnerable.

There is one more bit of news. Samsung is giving guidance that smartphone sales in Q1 will be down due to seasonal factors ie after-Christmas sales decline. We can read between the tealeaves that Apple also expects such a decline into Q1 (January-March) quarter and with that, its now a real race between these two giants for also the next quarter. That is stunning. Only a year ago Samsung was twice the size of Apple. And Apple did not grow faster than the industry. Its Samsung who has stumbled, quite badly, in 2014. Can they correct this badly listing ship over at Gangnam. We know the next iPhone sales spike will come for the Christmas quarter of 2015. Samsung needs two strong growth quarters in the summer if it intends to achieve a 'buffer' to remain top dog this year, to counter the spike coming from Cupertino at the end of the year. It will perhaps be an interesting year, after all, in Bloodbath Year 5 haha.. Stay tuned.

And if you were curious how did Strategy Analytics award the Q4 race between Apple and Samsung? They didn't. They gave it as a tie. 74.5 million each haha.

UPDATE PART 2 IDC gave the race to Samsung on a margin of 600,000 smartphones in Q4, and 75.1M units for the Samster

More Q4 and end of year analysis as we get numbers 

Apple passes 'Nokia' Microsoft for ALL their phones, smart and dumb - Bloodbath Results: Apple Oct-Dec Quarter and record iPhone units give it a big milestone (Expanded)

And we start on the final end-of-year results. Apple Q4 results (Calendar quarter, not Fiscal quarter) ie October-to-December sales (Christmas Quarter) were 74.5 million iPhone units. My preliminary quarterly market share for iPhone is 19.2% (up from 12.3% in Q3). Because of the peculiar launch pattern by Apple that produces that huge sales spike for one quarter going from Q3 to Q4, and then essentially flat sales for the next 9 months of diminishing Quarterly market share, the relevant measure with Apple is always the annual comparison. So compared to Q4 of 2013, the unit sales of iPhones are up 46% (better than the industry overall) and the market share is also up from Q4 of 2013 which was 17.8%.


ADDITION Jan 30: I have added the part to the bottom about iPhone 6 models selling to existing vs new customers based on analysis of info released in the the Apple conference call transcript


And we have cause to congratulate Apple. It climbs yet another rung on the ladder of biggest handset manufacturers when all phones are included (smart and dumbphones) as the largest pure smartphone maker. Apple held 3rd largest handset manufacturer title still in Q3. Now as Microsoft reported again declining total (Nokia) handset sales down to 50.2 million units, Apple has jumped Microsoft-Nokia taking the 2nd largest handset maker title with its 74.5 million iPhone units for the Christmas Quarter. Its a pretty safe bet, the lead is so strong for Apple, with Microsoft winding down the dumbphone side of its business (still 80% of its Nokia phones shipped in Q4 were dumbphones not Lumia smartphones) that this 2nd largest ranking is safely in Apple's hands now. Congratulations Apple, really a massive achievement for a pure smarphone maker selling the most expensive line of phones, to become the world's second largest handset maker. The moment they took that ranking was just now, for Christmas 2014. Next up? Samsung haha... (stranger things have happened.. but I'm not yet forecasting Apple could do that feat haha) 

So we now also have the annual numbers. Apple final 2014 unit sales were 192.7 million iPhones, up 26% from 2013 just about the same rate as the industry grew. So I get a preliminary annual market share for the iPhone at 15.2% which is just marginally down from the 15.5% it was in 2013. Apple is safely the world's second largest smartphone maker, far above the 'next tier' where the next biggest is about half Apple's size (Lenovo). But even as the Wall Street iHysteria push silly iPhone world domination stories, no, Apple is not the biggest smartphone maker now. Its not even close. Samsung is the biggest. They sold well over 300 million smartphones in 2014. Yes, they are more than 50% bigger than Apple just on their smartphone business alone (even more of a lead if we count all phones).

The iPhone annual market share for the Bloodbath years has looked like this:
2010 . . . 13.4%
2011 . . . 19.1%
2012 . . . 19.5%
2013 . . . 15.5%
2014 . . . 15.2% (preliminary)

As to all phones, when we include the now rapidly shrinking dumbphone sector, Apple has now hit 10% of all phones sold. Now THAT is a truly staggering stat where the bottom end is selling ultra-basic non-cameraphones at 20 dollars without countract.

I want to mention the humongous profits Apple is making. Good for them. We will NOT discuss the profit angle to Apple's excellence here. I have acknowledged it, but I will not welcome the financial performance discussions to this blog. Don't post such comments, I will delete them. We know its the most profitable public corporation in the history of Wall Street. Good for Apple investors. We won't talk share prices and stock evaluations on this blog. You can talk about other issues about iPhones, Macs, iPads, Apple Watches, iTunes, the App Store ecosystem etc if you want. Don't mention the word 'profit' or any synonyms or share prices or financials, else your comment is mercilessly deleted. Go talk to a Wall Street blog about share prices.

But iPhone pricing is a valid issue to discuss and I take some pride in that I was pushing not just Apple to split its annual product launches from 1 to 2 models per year, and to offer larger screens like Samsung, and pushing for Apple to introduce NFC, and to introduce mobile money (all that BTW for example Nokia had already in 2010 haha so still now it holds true, to see what comes next in an iPhone, look at an old Nokia) but yes, I was urging Apple to pursue higher price iPhones beyond the weird 600 dollar artificial price ceiling they set for themselves for many years. Now luckily finally, last autumn Apple went above those traditional prices to 750 dollars (unsubsidised price) for the iPhone 6 Plus. As I've argued on this blog for many years - including showing the price pyramid - there IS room for more expensive flagship smartphones. And now Apple is reaping the benefits also of that free advice that your trusty iPhone analyst of the CDB blog has offered here for years haha.. Also on the silly stuff. Yeah some analysts went overboard with their iHysteria claiming Apple sells more in China than in the USA. I told my followers on Twitter that the math doesn't work and called them out as the nonsense was being published. Now, what will soon happen (likely now 2015 or latest 2016) is that the Chinese New Year gift-giving season prolongs Apple's sales pattern and expressly helps boost China sales to a China peak. Simultaneously in the USA, the post-Christmas doldrums mean a decline in sales. It IS possible we'll see one quarter where Apple iPhone sales in China pass the USA sales, and the year that happens, it will be in the January-March quarter, not the October-December quarter. And yes, that could happen now in 2015. If not now, very likely next year, as China already sells about twice as many total smartphones as the USA and soon will sell 3 times as many.

A side note. iPod sales are down about 5 million units from the Christmas Quarter of 2013 to now. As we see in the overall smartphone vs tablet market, tablet sales have stalled and phablet-screen size smarthones now outsell tablets. So Apple 'caught the wave' just in time (or arguably just slightly behind the optimal moment) but yes, part of the iPhone 6 spectacular jump in sales was now taken by cannibalizing Apple iPad sales. I am sure Apple knew this was going to happen but still, its an interesting observation. iPad sales grew YoY up to Q4 of 2013 when they hit 26.0 million. Now YoY iPads are down for first Christmas, to 21.4M. Its yet more proof that the future is centered on mobile and a tablet is only an ultra-portable PC and a different animal from a similar large-screen device, the phablet/smartphone.


ADDITION Jan 30 - There was heated debate in the comments about were the iPhone 6 sales going to steal new customers (ie from Samsung) or going to existing iPhone customers (as I had predicted). We have a clear statement in the Apple conference call about that specific fact. Tim Cook said that a 'low teens' level percentage (thats American speak for 12% - 13% type of numbers when you want to be vague) of iPhone installed base has upgraded to the new 6 models. They also said in the conference call transcript that all 4 models are selling very well and the bestselling model is iPhone 6. But in addition to 6 Plus also they specified 5C and 5S are also selling well. So somewhat even type selling not one phone selling half for example. Lets make a quick analysis on 'very favorable terms' to iPhone 6 models. Lets assume the split was 1-2-3-4 so 40% were bestselling model (iPhone 6). Second bestselling model was iPhone 6 Plus at 30% (not necessarily so as its the most expensive model). Then 5C and 5S will have 20% and 10% whichever way you want to divide those. That means 70% of total iPhone sales are 6 models, and 30% are older and cheaper 5 models. 70% of 74.5 million total iPhones sold in Q4 means 52 million.

Now 'low teens' were upgrades to installed base. The installed base was 373 million at the end of Q3. If we take low end of that number, 12% thats 45 million iPhone owners had upgraded to new larger-screen 6 models. Nice. But that mean only 7 million iPhone sales of the new 6 models went to new Apple buyers. Most went to upgrade sales to returning loyal iPhone users. Of that 7 million part was first-time smartphone owners. Only a part of 7 million were 'steals' from rival OS platforms such as Samsung users on Android. As Samsung itself later reported its Q4 numbers and said that while unit sales were down, their Galaxy Note 4 sales were strong, the steals weren't from Samsung's phablet sized Galaxies, probably more were older Galaxy S5 models instead which are now soon a year old models. Probably a part of those steals were from first Lumia large-screen buyers who obviously don't want more dead Windows Phone OS smartphones especially as the Nokia name is disappearing and Microsoft reports their growth is in the bottom end of Lumia line. But yes, the iPhone 6 models have stolen some customers for Apple, but not much from Android and very few if any Android phablet-screen sized rivals. Apple own reporting tells us most iPhone 6 models were sold to their existing base, which makes perfect sense. Its not first-time Apple users who stand in line overnight to get their iToys. The big spike sales is OF COURSE driven by the loyalists who have to attend iChurch every year. Next scheduled iChurch gathering is April for the Midnight Mass of the hailing of the Apple Watch.

PS if you are a fan of all iThings, you will probably enjoy my iDream what I think should be the next industry Apple should go and iRevolutionize.

But yeah. The quarterly results are now coming in. I'll post more as we hear from other Top 10 brands (Microsoft-Nokia is such an irrelevant spec in the market now as they've fallen out of the Top 10 smartphone manufacturers, its not worth its own entry. I'll cover Lumia soon in some blog that includes several smaller news items)

I Dream the iDream: my iFantasy is yes an iCamera. And isn’t it about time Apple did another iRevolution of a stagnant major global industry like cameras? (updated)

I Dream the iDream. My iFantasy is yes an iCamera. Seriously. Apple Watch? Whats that gonna solve? Nothin'. But if there ever was a stagnant former mass market tech industry sector just ripe for iRevolution, it is that of the camera industry.

Yesterday I wrote a long blog not about the top smartphones but about the best CAMERAphones in the world today. In it I went through ‘everything’ in painstaking detail with tons of illustrations, about a camera on a phone in its primary use (to take pictures, I didn’t discuss video recording which introduces other needs like recording stereo sound etc). But yes, we examined the pinnacle of camerphone design. And in that long blog I also went into great technical detail in what issues are involved from the sensor to the shutter to the lens and so forth.


UPDATE 13 Feb 2015 - I will just mention briefly, spotted this rare consumer tidbit today: According to Comtech 2014 study, the third most important criterion in consumers buying a phone today is the camera, ahead of screen or battery life, and behind only 4G/LTE connectivity and reliability/durability. So just as an observation here, about was my blog relevant to the industry when I posted it last month haha.. Now please continue reading..


It has been on my mind a lot as that blog was a long project. And as I was editing the blog, suddenly I came upon an idea. I have been to the mountaintop. I have a dream. I have an iDream. So lets fantasize a bit. What if Apple introduced the iCamera?

Lets forget everybody else, probably nobody else could pull this off but consider Apple. How radical iRevolution was the Macintosh into a world of meek personal computers that ran MS DOS at the time? CD Rom drive, mouse, laser printing, hypertext, WYSIWIG from screen to print (gosh, what was the headache with ‘printer codes’ prior to the Mac), the 3.5 inch floppy disk (what our ‘save’ icons are based on BTW, diskettes before the Mac were truly ‘floppy’ flexible disks of 5.25 inch size), and a machine so incredibly easy to use, you never had to take a course on how to operate a computer. It was so easy, it was ‘intuitive’. It seems odd to today’s PC users to learn, that back in the 1980s you had to go take a course on HOW to operate the PC itself. CTRL-ALT-DEL haha the three-fingered salute as we used to call it to reboot the computers that so often crashed. Yes. Every Windows based PC and any other PC on Linux or any other OS today, can trace its origins to that world-shattering iRevolution, the Mac.

Same happened with the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and the iPad. Apple looked at a stagnant portable music player market dominated by the world’s most powerful consumer electronics brand, Sony, with its Walkman. Apple didn’t try to introduce a better portable cassette music player. No, it went huge. A computerized pocket music player with enormous storage capacity for ‘all your music’ and a correspondingly breathtaking pricetag. And what happened. Apple ran away with the portable music player market. Apple revitalized the market, which itself grew massively, and in that new ‘market space’ as Alan Moore and I discuss in the first case study in our book, Communities Dominate Brands (the signature book for this blog) the iPod owned the top price range while many clone providers sold cheaper MP3 players too. It wasn’t until the musicphone showed up in the middle of the past decade (including Sony Walkman branded) that finally broke iPod’s reign (and then ushered in the iPhone as Apple’s counterstrike).

So would it be totally beyond the realm of possibility that Apple launched an iCamera? They reinvented personal computers and created the most expensive PC brand in the process out of the Mac compared to the existing cheap PCs. Apple reinvented portable music players again discovering price levels never imagined. Apple reinvented the music store, the smartphone and the tablet PC. And really, to go to its roots, lets remember that it was Apple who INVENTED the digital camera for consumers. The world’s first consumer camera that was digital, not film-based was the Apple Quicktake 100. And when was this? 21 YEARS ago. So this is not a radical idea for Apple just as how a pocket computer (iPhone) was not, as it is the grandson product from the Newton, Apple’s first PDA ie pocket computer (and why ‘grandson’ because the iPhone is the direct son of the iPod). So in a similar way, if the Quicktake 100 was the grandfather and iPhone is now the dad, why not do the modern mobile-phone connected digital camera - indeed the iCamera - the way only Apple can. And with the total disruption of the camera industry that inevitably follows Apple’s succesful product launches. (Not all Apple products are market successes even with the awesome innovations they may have, we only need look at the Newton which indeed did revolutionize the PDA market but wasn’t a commercial success itself for Apple).

So this Spring Apple is launching the Apple Watch. Apple already knows this isn’t going to be the next big thing. Look how cautious and coy they are about it. Apple has already declared that they will not even reveal how many units of Apple Watches are sold every quarter so they KNOW it will be bad.

The watch industry sells about 1 Billion watches per year but most of those are ten dollar watches from China. The premium watch segment is only modest and the Apple Watch is comprehensively overpriced to play there (against a Seiko or Casio or Timex in the 50-100 dollar range). The Apple Watch can only find customers in the luxury end of the watch industry and that is tiny. Is it 1% where consumers pay a lot for their watches? If it is, thats 10 million units per year and that includes the Rolexes and Tag Heuers and Patek Philippes who won’t ‘downgrade’ to any Apple Watch. So can Apple take 10% of the luxury watch market, maybe. Thats a million watches, haha, a drop in the bucket for Apple’s scale in iProducts. Or say it revolutionizes the watch market. As the Apple Watch is only functional with an iPhone, the market is already limited only to current iPhone owners. Might the Apple Watch sell 10 million units. If Apple is lucky maybe. But not 50 million. And not at any kind of super prices and profits. As an accessory strategy to boost iPhone product line profits, the Apple Watch is a good idea yes. As a step towards wearables, yes. As a profit generator for Apple’s bottom line it is not going to be big enough.

HOW BIG IS BIG

Now, remember the Walkman musicplayer market was about 100 million units of annual sales in size when Apple entered it in 2001. How big is the stand-alone camera market? A bit under 100 million nowadays, as its in decline and as consumers are switching over to cameraphones instead. So how big is the premium camera market of stand-alone cameras? Its BIG exactly because most who wanted a very basic simple point-and-shoot camera have already gone to cameraphones and whats left in camera and electronics stores are mid priced and premium cameras. So the premium camera segment is at least some 20 million units and might be 30 million or more these days. And the brands there are Nikon and Canon and Olympus and Panasonic and Sony and Samsung. Gosh, half of these are brands that Apple has already demolished in the far more competitive smartphone wars and Nikon CEO has said in public, they made a mistake in not launching a smartphone.

Here we do have a major consumer electronics market opportunity that has a big size in the premium space where prices are far closer to an iPhone 6 Plus than a Timex watch, and where there exists room for MASS market products in the premium price ranges. So humor me. Imagine this scenario.

THE GOLDEN RULE

What would Steve Jobs do? He would institute a golden rule for the iCamera project: Pursue the ‘perfect pocket camera’. This would not be considered ‘the camera version of the iPhone’. Thats not good enough. That is too ‘Samsung-ish’ or sorry, Nokia-ish. So if Apple launches a new iPhone model as say ‘iPhone Camera’ as a ‘direct rival’ to the Lumia 1020 and Galaxy K Zoom, another slab smartphone with a ‘camel hump’ for its camera unit and market it as an iPhone 6C (for Camera) for example, that would be seen as ‘the ugly iPhone’. Apple purists are very style oriented. This is almost a non-starter. So just like how we know the iPad is an ultraportable touch-screen Mac PC, it was positioned totally different from Macs. No keyboard, no mouse. And not a Mac Tablet as the little sister to Macbooks. No. A totally different product category (that just happened to also be a full PC inside, ie another Mac).

 

But. Imagine Tim Cook at a random Apple event (one where a new iPhone is not expected to be launched and nobody is expecting any cameras to be introduced) and he looks like he’s done with his keynote, and he starts to walk off the stage, when he pauses and says the following:

Oh, I almost forgot. We have one more thing to announce today. We are launching a new Apple product. Its called the iCamera. It is the best pocketable camera in the world and will transform the camera experience for everybody. (audience in stunned silence. You can hear a pin drop.) Let me show you. It has a 62 megapixel sensor (audience erupts, Twitter goes mad, Tim Cook gets a 5 minute standing ovation). So yes, it has a 62 megapixel sensor, the best in the world, even the 45,000 dollar Hasselblad only has a 50 megapixel sensor. Our iCamera has a 12 times optical zoom, from 22mm to 265mm focal length (audience gasps, Twitter crashes, Tim Cook gets a 10 minute standing ovation, the voice of god comes on the loudspeakers and begs the audience to stop applauding and to sit down). Tim Cook knows he’s had his Steve Jobs moment and his reputation has now been made. He continues. The zoom lens is manufactured for us by camera lens specialists Carl Zeiss (loud cheers from audience, a spontaneous chant of i-cam-ra i-cam-ra i-cam-ra echoes in auditorium for 5 minutes).

So he rattles off several astonishing stats and abilities and ends with.. and it supports microSD storage, and it runs iOS, and the iCamera is fully integrated with Apple Watch and the App Store. Of course it is also an iPod. And its a fully-functional iPhone as well. It will come out in (12 weeks from the announcement). The room will stand and cheer and applaud him and Apple for 15 minutes with continous echo of the chant i-cam-ra, i-cam-ra, i-cam-ra. Some people in the audience will be treated for fainting in the euphoria. Apple’s share price shoots up 20% on the news and climbs another 30% in the next (x) months till the first sales begin in the global hype about the awesome iCamera revolution. Microsoft and Samsung share prices fall 10% on the news. The tech press will buzz for weeks about how only Apple could do something like this, take a stable industry past its prime and reinvent it.

NO OTHER BRAND, NO OTHER AUDIENCE

Apple has a totally disproportionate share of visually-oriented artists and professionals in the artistic industries. Look at Hollywood movies. The proportion of Apple computers in Hollywood movies suggests Apple owned 90% of the PC market. And Apple didn’t have to bribe those producers to include Macs as the PCs in every office scene. The artistic industries utterly love all things with the Apple logo. The advertising industry is totally overrun by iSheep. Try to find a Chief Marketing Officer of any Fortune 500 sized company who isn’t using an iPhone. The marketing departments of banks even run on Macs. All serious photograpers or videographers edit their photos and videos on Macs not on PCs. Its a total love affair for those arts who deal in the visual, because early Macs were far superior to do picture editing and video (starting with the enormous utility of the mouse over using a keyboard, and making things on print for the first time to be exactly the same as it was on the screen). This is Apple’s natural domain.

But every such visually-oriented artist (graphic designer, cinematographer, photojournalist, you name it) secretly prays that the next iPhone would finally have a decent camera. No, they will never do the blaspheme of complaining about the camera on their latest iPhone 6 Plus, but secretly they envy the Lumia 1020. If they have seen the Galaxy K Zoom they will think, Apple should do one of those. They won’t say it, but they think it, and they pray in their heart Tim Cook could deliver this miracle. These are visually-oriented professionals in the arts. They all love cameras, pictures and videos. And while yes, they greatly like and trust their Macs and iPads and iPods and iPhones - these are intuitively visual people, camera people, photograph people, video, television and film people. They will fall in love with the iCamera as nobody has fallen in love with any tech before. If you can remember the hype about the original iPhone, this is the only time Apple will ever top that. Not because the device is that much better but yes, because this is the perfect tech toy for exactly those people who communciate with us with the most powerful tools - pictures and video. They, the professionals, out of their love of iCamera, will sell it for Apple, to us. By the time it hits the stores, our moms and dads will want one too.

THE PERFECT POCKET CAMERA

Apple didn’t attempt to create a supercomputer when they made the Macintosh. They did not try to outdo the top ‘professional’ end of computers in the mainframe types of computers. Apple launched the Mac as the best consumer PC. The same with the iPhone, not attempting even to create a smartphone at the time (in 2007, the original iPhone was only a featurephone while Nokia, Samsung, Blackberry and the gang all made smartphones). But the iPhone totally revolutionized and forever changed the whole handset industry. Today 50 dollar iPhone-a-clones are available from Chinese manufacturers who in 2006 would have made keyboard-operated small-screen dumbphones that looked like Nokias. So understand Apple ethos and what the iCamera would be. It would not try to be a professional DSLR. Apple doesn’t need to try to do a proper professional DSLR camera and arguably, that market is too tiny for Apple to bother.

But the point-and-shoot camera market could use some iRevolution. It will be cameraphones anyway. Why not do the iThing to it? What could an Apple iOS iPhone Apple Watch legacy device be, in a perfect world, if Apple gave us an iCamera?

PASS ME SOME MEGAPIXELS

So Nokia had the awesome ‘wow’ factor with the 41 megapixel sensor inside the Nokia 808 Pureview in 2012 when any sane Nokia CEO would have strutted on every stage illustrating how amazing that was when the rivals offered sensors in the 8mp to 16mp range. But then-CEO of Nokia (world’s worst CEO of all time) Stephen Elop was only eager to destroy Nokia’s handset market so he would fulfill the conditions of his CEO bonus incentive, that astonishing leap in tech was actively ignored by Nokia’s new CEO and got minimalist attention from the Nokia marketing department which was ordered to push the far less capable Lumia products instead. Elop could have had his ‘Steve Jobs moment’ with the 808 Pureview if he had been smart. By the time that tech came to the Lumia 1020 fnally in 2013, the story was old news. This was the same tech the handset and camera industry had seen a year earlier.

Last year (2014) Hasselblad introduced their DSLR which now has the world’s largest sensor by pixel count, at 50 megapixels. So even copying Nokia/Microsoft or buying that same 41 megapixel sensor from its manufacturer Toshiba of Japan would no longer be the ‘best’. But the pixel density on the larger Toshiba sensor of 41mp (the one in the 808 Pureview rather than the Lumia 1020) could rather easily accommodate a 50% increase in pixels while keeping the sensor physical size the same. If 41mp was the ‘state of the art’ in 2012, by now in 2015, Toshiba should be able to push 62mp onto that same design. But 62mp on the iCamera when stand-alone digital cameras typically have sensors with 16 to 24 megapixels and even the pro DSLR cameras only go up to the 30-34mp range at their top? This would be monster news. (And if you want to read what all matters in the sensor, from physical size to pixel count to sensor sensitivity to light, read the sensor part of my cameraphone blog from yesterday).

If Tim Cook says in 2015 that Apple are launching an iCamera with 62mp sensor, it is news worthy of tech hysteria. And the theme of Spring 2015 Apple press is how the cameraindustry will be demolished just like how Sony Walkman was by the iPod, and how Nokia and Blackberry were by the iPhone etc. Note, if he instead announces an iPhone with that 62mp sensor, everybody is going to argue and debate the merits of does iPhone need such a camera, how expensive will it be, how ugly is it and who needs that on a phone when Microsoft can’t sell the Lumia 1020 in any volume after 2 years on the market.

ZUM-ZUM

Same with the optical zoom lens. Go bigger than the real rival, ie Samsung’s Galaxy K Zoom which has 10x optical zoom lens, by Samsung, from 24mm - 240mm equivalent focal length. So do 12x optical zoom, manufactured by Carl Zeiss, and go past Sammy on both extremes, from wider, at 22mm to further telephoto to 265mm in focal length equivalent. This will be ‘inherently better’ than any cameraphone and indeed any pocketable stand-alone point-and-shoot camera sold today. By quite a margin. And the tech is not rocket science, this is all well within current technology production capacity. But normally the premium cameramakers will shift their customers to DSLR type cameras at the top end. If Apple says thats for pro shooters, and the iCamera will revolutionize the mass market for cameras, this is now a different proposition. And as the iCamera in reality is the Camera iPhone, and has the iPhone fully integrated - now Apple can easily sell this device for 999 dollars where the rival cameramakers and rival smartphone makers aim for half that price level on their nearest equivalent prodcuts today. This IS an industry ripe for some iRevolution.

NO iLIMITS

So yeah, after those specs (62mp sensor, 12x optical zoom by Carl Zeiss) lets say Tim Cook really said ‘no limitations’. It need not conform to the rules of an iPhone as long as iPhone full functionality is indeed still built in. Only obey the golden rule, make it the best pocket camera that ever was. Lets start with storage. iPhones don’t have expandable storage. But all digital cameras and video cameras do have it. So here, lets include a microSD with say 128GB storage space (with capacity for 256GB by the next iOS update). That will give you storage space for over 30 hours of full HD video recorded at full 1080. Yeah, then when its filled up, stick in the next microSD card. They only cost a pittance today anyway. For iPhone users this is not a big need but for ‘serious’ camera buffs and especially anyone shooting video, it is indeed important to have removable memory and potentially - tons of it. Imagine a professional photographer on a safari shooting days of video. They need the storage space. And the iPhone design laws inside Apple forbid microSD (for whatever warped reasons.. iNonsense follows). But yes, an honest ‘world’s best pocketable camera’ would of course have removable storage. It need not be microSD, could be some other media but microSD would currently make most sense, at least to me.

A MAGICAL VIEW

Then think about the viewfinder. ‘Real’ cameras have proper viewfinders (the little holes you stick your eye to, and see what you are aiming at). Cameraphones only use the large touch-screens for aiming the camera. Now. Some will like one, some will like the other, and I would guess, most who are ‘serious’ about photography will insist on a real viewfinder. That gives us a conundrum. What kind of viewfinder? If you put a see-through viewfinder on the body of the camera, where you aim roughly in the right diretion, that has little diagrams inside exactly what will be the photograph, that creates what is called ‘parallax’ problems. The viewfinder sees approximately what you aim for, not exactly. It also will not adjust to zoom. And on a cameraphone - it means you have to have a ‘window’ through the device which cuts into the back-side, where you want the largest touch-screen possible. If you fit in the window for the viewfinder, the touch-screen will need to shrink a bit.

Well, the traditional camera industry solution to parallax viewfinders is then to give a mirrored design with the viewfinder seeing through the same lens you use, through yes, mirrors. One mirror is now in the way of the film or digital sensor, and that mirror has to be moved out of the way when taking pictures. So yes, there is a high-speed moving mirror inside almost all expensive cameras, that flaps out of the way, and back into positin in a tiny fraction of one second. That is expensive, cumbersome, and soooo last century. What would the company of Steve Jobs do? What would the company of ‘retina display’ do? What would a company that calls itself a ‘mobile’ company do? It would do a mirrorless viewfinder. Duh. Oh, and what would Apple the ‘mobile’ company do with this viewfinder? It would make the viewfinder a REMOVABLE mirrorless viewfinder.

And not package it in the original box, as all users don’t want it and need it. SELL IT AS AN ACCESSORY. In an ‘only Apple would dare to charge this much’ kind of price. Then include the connectors to do a very solid attachment, for those who want to keep the viewfinder permanently on the iCamera. Make sure the viewfinder is VERY SLIM in one dimension (in some way foldable), so if you want to put it in your pocket separately as two items, the viewfinder  won’t be essentially any thicker/fatter than the iCamera itself when it is ‘folded in’ to its travel configuration at its slimmest (ie zoom lens fully retracted into the body). But also, while perhaps bulky, ensure that even if attached to the iCamera the combination with the accessory mirrorless viewfinder would not make the iCamera too bulky for a pocket - even though yes now your pocket would of course bulge somewhat. Remember, we are not now playing by iPhone rules of creating the world’s slimmest ‘smartphone’. We are now iRevolutionizing the camera industry and are creatin the world’s best pocketable camera. The pocket may bulge a bit, thats still pocketable..

And as this is the wireless age, make it so that in something like Bluetooth range, make it a REMOTE viewfinder! So the iCamera can be operated remotely if the user wants. (It would need some extra wireless transmission through-put to deliver retina-display live video to the viewfinder in real time, so maybe the iCamera could have a dual BT connection or some other clever Apple solution to this, so the real-time image won’t suffer from the lag and be as jittery as the Sony Xperia DX10 accessory zoom lens is).

But yeah. A proper honest real viewfinder. Add into it the diopter-correction for anyone who needs eyeglasses - remember most Apple users are older, richer people, who won’t necessarily have the perfect eyesight of their youth. Who else offers a removable retina-display resolution viewfinder that is this smart - and wireless to operate also remotely? Not every iCamera user who even wants one would end up buying it. Later Apple could release a junior spec cheaper version too of the viewfinder that doesn’t do quite retina display but still good enough to easily aim and control the iCamera (line of products). But sold as an accessory, you can have the best ever pocket camera with incredible specs, and yet not break the bank in the price of the basic, fully functional unit.

TRIPOD SCREW MOUNT

So lets iFantasize further. All the missing pieces of course. So yes, it has to have the normal tripod screw. That also is increasingly useful with selfie-cams. And have a proper hotshoe for real flashguns. And again, lets invent another silly overpriced iGadget. Since we now have the real tripod mount screw, then offer a motorized tripod iBase for the iCamera that doubles as a tablestand. If you want to place the iCamera on a table and use the removable viewfinder and want to move the camera left-or-right, or up-or-down (not just zoom), then yes, a little motorized iBase to remotely aim the iCamera. Hey, I can now imagine a million new uses, temporary and permantent for the iCamera (and especially its later junior ‘nano’ cheaper version). And as the remote control of the motors of the iBase can be controlled with any iPhone, and of course it has the normal tripod mount on ITS bottom, you can screw this iMount onto your existing tripod (or selfie-stick) and then screw your iCamera on top of it. Remote control for the iCamera while on a tripod. Many pro and semi-pro camera users will love this. And also - this won’t be limited now to iCamera users, ANY serious camera users can add a remote control platform to any camera, operated on an iPhone or iPad or Mac, and put their Canon or Nikon or Hasselblad on it, and move that camera remotely.

While I’m at it. Sell the car kit. So now the iCamera can be used as the live car-cam (with monster-sized high def video storage of your whole trip) in case there is an accident (you know, like the famous YouTube videos from traffic accidents in Russia). Yes, many dash-cams exist, but of COURSE you want your iTunes ie iPod functionality of your iCamera to use in the car. Then the gimmick here - dual cams. Since the iCamera is an iPhone. And it of course has the inward-facing selfie cam (which should be upgraded for this iCamera to at least 2mp but to really amaze the audience, do it at 8mp. This is the best pocketable camera evah!) then yes, enable BOTH cameras to record live. Now you point the ‘main’ camera towards the front seeing the street ahead of where you drive, place the iCamera in the middle of the dashboard and its selfie cam sees the cars behind you, if someone crashes into you from behind haha. And thus the live recording ability to create two video recordings (in synch) one from front, one from behind. Again, Apple’s iCamera is better than anything else out there. This feature would be a trivial adjustment to the camera and storage software haha and could be enabled BTW on all iPhones from the next iOS update after the iCamera is launched haha.

ULTIMATE FLASH

So then, lets talk flash. So obviously we’ll include a real mechanical shutter. So the iCamera of course can do Xenon flash. But hey. We have 12x zoom. Why aren’t all real flashes ‘zoom’ flashes? (I didn’t know they existed). Yeah! Yes they do. Zoom flashes. Not a radical idea, they’ve existed at least since the 1980s. You have an adjustable mirror and/or move the Xenon tube outwards (wider angle flash) or deeper into the mirror assembly (narrower angle flash, gives more light to a focused area). Now... Lets say we do double Xenon flash - flashes cleverly positioned on both sides of the lens assembly so there is no massive shadow, and picture targets are lit evenly even in close-up pictures - and then we include ZOOM flash.

Remember, our brief from Tim Cook (or the ghost of Steve Jobs) is to revolutionize the camera industry by creating the best consumer camera, the best pocketable camera(phone). If we have real zoom optical zoom lens, then why not add zoom flash? Duh. Why not? Its not technically difficult. Yes its bulkier than no zoom but a modest flash zoom would fit easily into the pocketable device and extend the max range of the flash by maybe 50%.

So, most DSLR cameras that happen to have a flash built-in, can’t do this because they don’t know which lens you have attached and what is its zoom setting. Most point-and-shoot cameras didn’t bother with big flash setups because serious camera users would get stand-alone flashguns anyway that are far more powerful. So. Lets just imagine. Since there is no removable lens on the iCamera, and the zooming is of course controlled by the same programming as all of the camera, it would be childs play for Apple to include the logic that records what is the current zoom setting on the lens. And then if we press the shutter to take the picture, to use the appropriate zoom setting on the flash too!

Now, it need not be uber-fancy at this type of device but come on. Dual Xenon flash both with zoom. Apple’s tech engineers speaking after Tim Cook would have a field day explaining first why Xenon outperforms all LED flashes. Then why no other pocketable camera has dual flash synchronized around the lens like iCamera and why that creates both nasty shadows in pictures - AND means badly lit images at short range (lopsided flash exposure). THEN they show off the zooming. The zoom setting need not be more than 3 settings, wide angle, mid-range and telephoto. But the SAME Xenon tube that hits 5 meters (15 feet) in standard mode would reach at least 8 meters (24 feet) in maximum zoom. And remember, the lens is concurrently zoomed, so no unnecessary light now spills to make the rest of the room white, while the camera only focuses on the area in the middle.

The range improvement need not be drastic, but in flash photography, even small improvements in range mean very much better pictures. And once again, Apple can claim totally legitimately that no other pocket camera offers this powerful and smart flash tech and its another reason why iCamera is best pocket camera ever, and in future all cameras will be like this. The costs of that what I explained are not enormous but nobody has ever done it because ‘good flash’ tech belongs to the DSLR segment. But boy, would this be a massive leap in flash use and distance for any pocketable camera.

So lets talk a bit more about the zoom. I said 12x zoom (thats to just be sure that the iCamera beats the K Zoom fair and square) but if we go to 22mm thats bordering on fish-eye lenses that start at 21mm. HA !! But Apple are a computer company, not an optical camera company. If Apple know, this same lens is the only one ever in this particular camera, and Apple know the wide-angle setting of the lens, why not write the program code that corrects the optical distortions of the lens from 23mm to 22mm ultra-wide-angle and make that the default setting.

Come on, a child could do this. Just set the actual prototype camera on a bench, point it at a wall with perfectly drawn parallel lines, and compare how much the actual picture distorts them. Then write the code to correct them. Now its not just the best camera that ever was, it is a MAGICAL camera. Only Apple, a computer company, could think of using a distorting lens setting, to break through the 24mm wide angle ‘barrier’ into mildly fish-eye lens territory, and still be able to deliver perfectly correct pictures from it, with no noticable distortion. Now Apple could legitimately also claim the crown for all those family group settings, oh, don’t you have a camera this smart that it fits everybody into the picture? Well go buy yourself an iCamera then... And yes, allow the optional setting for those who would like to see the mild fish-eye distortion effect at 22mm, for those shutterbugs who really want fish-eye.

MY HORSE, TRIGGER

The cameramakers will be desperate at this stage. Their industry is being devastated by the iPod-dudes from California. So some other obvious things. Have you ever taken pictures with a major brand DSLR camera? Do you remember how that shutter release button was. Ie the ‘trigger’. It was feather-light. Now how’s that button on your current smartphone when you press it to take pictures? Yeah. Good point, Tomi, it IS very heavy. And why is that? Because it was designed by some PHONE engineers who don’t want your phone to go off accidentially in your pocket, dial an expensive international phone number and bankrupt you with the phone bill. They made it deliberately so. But thats not how the best pocketable camera should be. If designed by a camera engineer, the trigger ie shutter release HAS to be feather light. Why? So it won’t cause extra shaking of the camera exactly at the point when you take the picture - because that creates photographs that are not sharp.

Now which would Steve Jobs do? He would OF COURSE insist that on the iCamera the shutter release has to be like a camera, not like a phone. And be feather-light two action trigger (half-way activates the camera sensors) and yes, to have a separate, probably PHYSICAL lock to it, to prevent accidential exposures from your pocket. AND Apple being now a phone maker, it would have ANOTHER button that activates or disables the phone. Duh. This is not rocket science (but its not telephone science either haha).

So yeah. All normal things that should be on the best cameraphones but currently are not. So of COURSE it would have the standard-size tripod-mount screw. This separates real cameras from toys. And even selfie-stick users will greatly prefer to screw their expensive iCamera to the stick rather than use those flimsy claws haha.... Same for Flashgun hotshoe. The industry standard hotshoe that lets you connect any flashgun to the iCamera if you want real flash power or - obviously the more enlightened photo-buffs - to have the flash projected into other diretions like an umbrella or wall etc. And yes, offer those users the chance to disable the dual Zoom flash units of the iCamera if they have fancier flash gear. Easy to do if you’re a computer company and your cameraphone is all run by softwarwe. Its far more a hassle of you are a camera company that doesn’t think this way. And the iCamera would have a self-timer that you don’t need to hunt fifteen menu items into the software, the self-timer would be activated by its own external control. Simple, easy, obvious.

TO GO WHERE NO CAMERA HAS GONE BEFORE

But hey, lets go big. Lets go bold. Lets go science fiction. Its Apple. So 3D. Now, no no no. I don’t mean the iCamera should have 3D photography upon it ie stereoscopic dual cameras at these specs. Noooooo. I mean, do the Apple thing to it. Do the iMagic. Do the iAwesome. Allow two iCameras to be combined to shoot 3D pictures and videos. A specialized connector that allows two iCameras to snap together, both super lenses poiting now in the same direction with the necessary software to convert that into a stereoscopic video image and obviously all this synchronized at the design stage so it all works. Hey. This makes sense. You get a full HD 1080 defintion videocamera with 12x optical zoom - and you can shoot full 3D video - by only buying two iCameras !!! (And this being all iCamera and iOS, the dual system would be controlled in synch from one of the iCameras or you could haha, use the removable viewfinder or even your Apple Watch).

Many Hollywood producers will get a pair of iCameras just because of this ability. The 3D ‘merging’ software to create the 3D video could be from a 3rd party and sold separately. Its just that as far as I know, no digital camera today can be combined with its sister to do 3D pictures and videos (And I apologize if this is standard stuff and I just am not up to the evolution of digital cameras haha). Certainly no cameraphone has suggested anything like it.

Now, not many commercial movies will necessarily be shot this way - but darn gosh, many 3D television programs WILL BE for all those cable TV channels desperate for new 3D content. 3D video shooting gear is expensive, especially gear that would have 12x optical zoom lens. So yeah, Apple, make the awesome camera that becomes the most used 3D video shooting apparatus too. Best of all every 3D Spielberg will have to buy two iCameras. All Apple need to do, is at the design stage prepare for this, position the cameras appropriately and design the attachment options so, that two iCameras can be attached into one larger camera unit with two cameras in stereoscopic synch.

Which, of course then also, would combine the photo ability to a mind-boggling 124 megapixels if you want to take pictures (since we’ve gone through the trouble of synching the two iCameras this way anyway). So now, haha 124 megapixels - many pro camera users who think their Canon or Nikon pro cameras are not powerful enough when they shoot for example posters, they will consider using the iCamera rather than renting a film-based Hasselblad and do the digital scanning from the film based picture.

CALLING DICK TRACY

So Dick Tracy then? Yes, this is THE device to help the hopeless Apple Watch find some use-cases. YES, of course the iCamera is fully compatible with Apple Watch and yes, you can use the Apple Watch to see what the camera sees, very useful in selfies for example, and yes, use the Apple Watch as your remote control for the iCamera. In fact, being an iOS device, any Apple product can control it - Macs, iPhones, iPads...

OOOH, SPOOKY!

What about pictures in the dark. I mean real dark. I mean infra-red. Yes Those green images we see in modern war movies and news footage. Infra-red is only light at a low wavelenght. If the sensor is built to detect those wavelengths, we have an infrared camera too. Hey, this means it will also see through walls !!! How cool is that (not accurately but detect heat etc. VERY useful for construction uses, and in emergencies detecting live people in collapsed buildings, etc). Only an Apple iCamera would come with infrared, wouldn’t it. And that opens the next door. The accessory. The infra-red light source. So if you want to take pictures in total pitch black darkness or see far into the dark night, buy the (obscenely priced) Apple iCamera accessory infra-red light source. Haha. How’s that for ubercool. It doesn’t need to sell more than 1,000 units and barely break even in its costs, but Apple has yet another sci-fi merit that blows the minds of all tech reporters and analysts and Apple is seen as visionary. Tech-wise this is not cutting edge but nobody offers it in a consumer pocket camera haha (or in anything near these price levels).

HOW MUCH?

Are you drooling already? Ok lets take now a trip back to reality. Lets leave the 3D and infra-red exotic stuff off the table but lets just do the basics. What I had originally described that Tim Cook would say, and the few obvious additions like tripod mount screw and microSD storage and soft trigger/shutter release. The obvious things if Apple introduced ‘the world’s best pocket camera’. What would this cost to make and what could Apple sell it for. Lets start on the costs. And obviously I am ignoring costs and prices of all accessories like the optional mirrorless viewfinder.

This is not a massive device by length and width, because it is thicker due to the zoom lens construction and large sensor. So it won’t have a 5 inch phablet screen. Those who buy the iCamera to be their primary iPhone, will do it for the camera and won’t mind a modest sacrifice on the screen size. Especially if it still is retina display. So we start with the last and best 4 inch screen iPhone, the iPhone 5S. Thats our phone base. Note that it was released 15 months ago, so today to manufacture those parts would cost probably something like 200 dollars.

Then lets add the camera. Take a top-end stand-alone fixed lens camera (ie not any DSLR) like say the Canon Powershot SX 280. A camera that would retail for say about 500 dollars. The manufacturing costs should be say 300 dollars or so. Now, we have some ‘synergies’ that both devices have, which we won’t need to duplicate. The iPhone 5S can leave out its 8mp camera. The Canon can leave out its screen, battery, CPU, RAM and some other internal goodies like that. So now the ‘incremental costs’ of only the new parts needed to do our hybrid camera-phone should add at most 200 dollars maybe less. We toss in some new iGoodies especially NFC for Apple Pay and we add some more CPU and RAM power for crunching all that computing of this hybrid device and the total manufacturing costs should still be less than 450 dollars. Except that the Canon was manufactured on a production run that certainly didn’t hit 1 million units, probably far far less than that. This is a premium point-and-shoot camera from a premium brand. Now instead, Apple source the components at a minimum run of 10 million units annually and get far more sourcing synergies with the iPhone range overall. Then the total costs should settle into around 400 dollars for the iCamera. In rough terms

And how to price it. Well, the iPhone 6 Plus is the flagship. It costs 750 dollars and has a massive screen etc. But no, we won’t stop there. This is a different device altogether and most certainly as I’ve described it, this device would fly off the shelves at 999 dollars (unsubsidised price). After the dealer markups, this would still be the device with the biggest profit per unit out of any iDevice sold today. Yes. I’d price it at 999 dollars. (And I’d stand in line to buy one).

RETAIL STRATEGY

Here is where Apple has a massive advantage (and a dangerous temptation). Nikon, Canon, Olympus and gang can’t sell where iPhones are sold. They don’t have the carrier relationships!! Yes, they have built a global network through camera stores and electronics retailers, but that is peanuts to what Apple can sell. As long as Apple gets the carriers/operators to treat this as the latest flagship iPhone - it is a full iPhone - and offer it the same sales support all iPhones get - this is the bestselling camera of the year compared to any stand-alone camera model by any brand. So Apple has to just be careful not to have the carriers ‘reject’ this as ‘only a camera’ haha.

The mistake Apple cannot make is to try to now push the virtual SIM onto the iCamera. It would instantly doom the project to only camera-store curiosity tech. Even suggesting to carriers ‘virtual SIM’ on this will make them as cold to the iCamera as they are to iPads. They hate virtual SIMs. So Tim Cook if you happen to be listening, this is the only achilles’ heel to the strategy. Don’t make that mistake. Promise carriers it has the standard nano SIM and no dual SIM and it will be run by Apple as a phone just like all other iPhones, and will be marketed as such. Then carriers know, their rivals will take it and unless everybody carries it, they will lose out and rivals will use it to steal customers. Just like how they can’t refuse now carrying the iPhone 6 Plus.

That doesn’t preclude Apple from selling through camera retailers and any other outlets. Of course. And at Apple stores. In those countries that have handset subsidies, this iCamera would have similar handset subsidies. So in the USA, if the iPhone 6 Plus sells for 299 dollars plus 2 year contract, then the iCamera would sell for 399 dollars and two year contract. The most expensive smartphone yes, but with it comes the amazing Apple camera tech haha...

The release cycle would be by 2 year intervals, alterate years release a new big-screen flagship iPhone 7 Plus, alternate years the update to iCamera. One year after this iCamera, release its nano brother, a junior version of lesser, but still impressive specs like say only 6x optical zoom, only 32mp camera sensor and only 3.5 inch retina display screen and selling for 699 but compatible with of course all iCamera accessories (and outrageously profitable too).

WHO BUYS IT

Will every Apple user buy this. Of course not. Will it cannibalize iPhone sales, of course it will, some of it. Against those downsides, it would massively increase the profitability of the iPhone line, and push the iPhone into ever higher price bands. It would serve as a big catalyst to expand iProduct ownership by existing iFans. But most of all, it would catch tons of new customers into the iFold. The iReligion needs new converts to come to confess their iLoyalty at the iAltar. And this iCamera attracts rich ones. Very rich ones. The iCamera will spawn a ‘little sister’ cheaper nano model which still yields iPhone 6 class of price tag and profit. The iCameras can grab the largest market share of stand-alone cameras ahead of any traditional camera brand and do to camera industry profits what the iPhone did to handset industry profits and iPod to portable music industry profits. Together these two iCameras will broaden iPhone’s market share of smartphones by about one fifth, and expand the reach of iOS ecosystem by about about 15%; reversing in a two-year horizon the decline of iPhone’s global market share annually. Which brings me to some obvious points about the customers.

First, yes, the visually-oriented Apple fans would flock to the iCamera. I can’t promise many Nikon or Canon DSLR owners would drop their kit and go iCamera-only (some will) but many would buy this as their next smartphone to have the best possible camera in their pocket when their fancy DSLR kit isn’t hanging around their neck at that moment of photographic inspiration. The far bigger opportunity is with the hundreds of millions of stand-alone camera owners who have been contemplating should they buy a new point-and-shoot camera, or go cameraphone, and felt the current offering underwhelming. This is THE camera for anyone who has a 5 year old digital pocket camera whose 5mp or 8mp sensor seems now a bit too weak. They know they have to get a new smartphone anyway, they want the new camera, they are already addicted shutterbugs. They will love the iCamera as the ultimate pocket gadget they always hoped could exist. The answer to all prayers this side of DSLR systems. Those rich camera owners will justify the increased cost in the iCamera that as a package - after all this is both camera and smartphones - this is cheaper - and as a camera, this truly blows the competition away. They can even justify the cost in that they ‘only’ buy the basic kit, and don’t thus have to pay for all the accessories (but come later into the store to buy that mirrorless viewfinder or whatever other gadgets Apple brings to the package).

Here there will be existing Apple fans for whom this is the obvious front-runner choice in point-and-shoot cameras. BUT. Here is a HUGE opportunity for Apple to pick up millions of users who are not in the iFamily yet, for whatever reason. Like me. My first criterion is camera. My second criterion happens to be QWERTY. So the iPhone has always failed me and I go elsewhere. But I’d love to go iPhone if they gave me a compelling camera. This would be it. Suddenly then - THEN the next laptop would almost have to be a Mac too, haha. All of the iProducts have boosted Mac sales from iPods to iPhones to iPads. And vice versa.

So I say this. Apple would sell 20 million iCameras in its first 12 months, 50 million per year by the third year if it adds the nano version. The top model could easily be priced at 999 dollars (or more) and produce massive profits for Apple. In the short run, nobody could match them, Samsung eventually would keep updating the K Zoom to offer the first viable rival. It would not be a cheap journey for Samsung to adjust to the iCamera. Several of the traditional cameramakers would file for bankrutpcy. New far cheaper clones of iCamera would appear out of China to grow the bottom end of this market with far more modest spec designs and into the 200 dollar price range. The total ‘camera’ market as redefined so that the device’s primary sales argument is camera, and it is sold also in camera stores, vs smartphones, would double to 200 million units per year. Apple would own 25% of that new market. These customers would all become or be fiercely loyal to Apple and Apple’s total gain would be at least 25 million first-time Apple owners with the iCamera of which at least a quarter would buy at least one other Apple product after using the iCamera for 2 years.

For those who are rich enough who wouldn’t worry about paying 1,000 dollars for a camera if it was good enough, and happen to be iPhone users, most of them would buy this as their newest camera and still have the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus as their main phone. Some who would buy the iCamera and use it for a while as their main phone, would then go get the phablet iPhone as their next ‘phone’ and the second phone alongside the iCamera as still the main phone, but for the large screen. Many however, who got the iCamera as their first Apple product would find many iReligion rituals and rules a bit odd, and would keep an Android in their other pocket or as their tablet. This would not win every battle but would definitely win Apple and iOS millions of new customers it cannot reach with the camera strategy they have with the normal iPhone.

IS THIS FEASIBLE AS A DESIGN

If we tone it down some more and only do the existing 500 dollar camera slapped onto the back of an iPhone 5S, that would still be arguably the best cameraphone in the world (with only the Galaxy K Zoom its practical concurrent rival). Even if we yes did that with the same Sony 20mp sensor as on the K Zoom and using say Canon’s 10x zoom optics etc, and toss in a bit of iSmoke and iMirrors to fool the world that this is now invented stuff rather than doing what others have been doing already. While Tim Cook’s audience reaction would not be as euphoric, it would still be a massive positive response (and very importantly, as long as almost no word has leaked out that this is coming). An iCamera with 20mp sensor, 10x optical zoom, mechanical shutter, xenon flash, macro, aperture control, a tripod screw mount, an accessory flash hotshoe mount, running full latest iOS, totally compatible with all other iProducts including that the Apple Watch can be used as the remote viewer and remote shutter release; and containing a full iPhone 5S with 4 inch retina screen. Priced at 999 dollars it would be the world’s best cameraphone and knowing Apple, it would not look cheap and plasticky like the Galaxy S4 Zoom and the Galaxy K Zoom. The iCamera would be the sexiest camera in the camerastores, the ultimate - oooh, I want THAT one - in brushed aluminum in black, and available also in silver and white and perhaps a few other colors later on. But a premium camera is made in metal, not plastic.

In specs this barely exceeds the K Zoom. But its an Apple. In many markets the K Zoom is not sold, most critically not in the USA, so all that press is utterly oblivious to the rival from Samsung. They will genuinely think this is the world’s first full optical zoom cameraphone and celebrate Apple for it. Even in markets where they would be sold side-by-side, now both the looks of the iCamera, and the age (newer) and the new iOS software vs old version of Android - and very critically all the iPhone 6 Plus software, and Apple’s better usability, would tip it in almost all reviews as a slight win by the iCamera. Now, those specs? 20mp, 10x optical zoom, xenon flash slapped onto an iPhone 5S. How long would it take for Apple engineers to prototype that cameraphone? Six months max. Tim Cook could demo this iCamera at some Apple show even early in the summer or latest just at the lauch of Autumn, and ship it as the ultimate Xmas iGift for 2015 in stores by December.

WHAT WOULD STEVE JOBS DO?

If Apple did it the Steve Jobs way (no we won’t compromise, we either do it so that it blows apart this industry, or else we won’t bother to launch it at all). Then with the 62mp sensor and 12x zoom and dual Xenon zoom flash, etc (while lets still leave the infra-red and 3D dual camera things for future versions) that would, I believe, only depend on the sensor. I have no idea about how long a CMOS sensor takes from drawing board to shipping from factory. BUT. The original Nokia 808 Pureview CMOS sensor was not made by Nokia (although they probably did a lot of its design and probably hold patents in that area). It was manufactured by Toshiba. I believe that the smaller sensor in physical size but same configuration and pixel count, that is on the Lumia 1020 is also made by Toshiba but I haven’t been able to verify that. But most definitely we know, that a 41mp ‘fat cross shaped’ CMOS sensor that is convertible from 4x3 to 16x9 resolutions at 38mp and 34mp respectively, was manufactured by Toshiba in 2012 in volume.

Toshiba should be relatively easily able to do that sensor or a very similar spec sensor in just about the amount of time it takes to retool and start the factory, especially if we are now looking at ‘Apple level sales’. How long to get that old sensor up into production? Months probably. Now, redesign it for 50% more pixel density? The second generation Pureview sensor of 41mp was already one third smaller in physical size one year later in 2013. And that CMOS sensor is nowhere near the extreme in pixel density. I obviously don’t know what I am talking about but it should not be very difficult to take the size of the 808 Pureview sensor, and upgrade its pixel count by 50% for that 62mp sensor. And again, what would this take in time. It can’t take more than a year from already existing designs. CMOS sensor pixel counts are increasing all the time, so that is a natural evolution for CMOS sensor manufacturers as it is. So if they agreed on this order now in January, the full spec iCamera could start to be assembled in January of 2016 and shipping say February-ish.

So about Nokia’s patents. A Nokia run by Stephen Elop the Microbrain who hated Apple, that Nokia might have resisted tooth and nail about offering its Pureview patents and technology to Apple and/or charged a huge royalty for it. Not necessarily this new Nokia in a post-Elop post-Windows post-Microsoft era. Nokia might even warmly welcome Apple licensing some of its advanced tech and be quite proud of being a tech supplier to mighty Apple of iPhones, now as Nokia ponders if it wants to return also as a handset maker (oh yes they do desperately they do). And the royalty fees could be quite modest. Microsoft doesn’t own these patents, Microsoft only bought rights to use those patents in mobile phones that it acquired when it bought Nokia handset unit last year. Nokia kept the ownership. Apple could very ‘easily’ license the Pureview technology and Nokia might even help Apple redesign the 41mp sensor into a 62mp while manufactured by Toshiba haha.

Same with Carl Zeiss. They are a pure lens manufacturer and serve anyone who wants precision optical glass. They have no doubt plenty of off-the-shelf designs for 10x zoom lenses of the sizes that would work in this instance. Might even have a 12x zoom design ready and waiting for a customer. This part I think (again, I am no expert on lens design and manufacturing) this part I think would not take 12 months to go from design to shipping sub-assembly. But also, Apple could approach another premium camera optics brand like Canon or Nikon to make their zoom lens for the iCamera. I could see Cupertino prefering not to use the exact same provider as Microsoft uses haha.

The design and manufacturing logistics and challenges of smartphones are significantly greater than those of pocket cameras. If Apple can bring us a new iPhone model every year, they could also give us the real dream iCamera, 62mp sensor, 12x optical zoom, dual zooming Xenon flash, designed with optional accessory viewfinder (with retina display). And have the whole thing announced well, one year and one week from today haha...

Why would Apple NOT do this?

So thats my iFantasy for you. A highly lucrative high tech opprortunity that sits perfectly within Apple strategy, supports the iOS family, boosts profits, gains new customes, satisfies a burning desire within the Apple loyalists, re-establshes Apple tech leaderhips, proves to investors Tim Cook can guide Apple past the Steve Jobs era, and it build on Apple’s true heritage of the Apple Quicktake 100. The iCamera if clearly introduced as a radical camera which just happens to have a full iPhone 5S on its back, would not hurt the sexy luxury appeal of the classic iPhone line and as Apple would clearly design the iCamera outwardly to be distinct, nobody would ever think ‘oh Apple has made an ugly iPhone’ like they thought of Nokia’s 808 Pureview, Lumia 1020 and Samsung’s two Galaxy Zoom smartphone models. And one ‘Apple hater’ blogger at the CDB blog could for once write the ultimate love-letter to his fave computer brand, that he never could so far. Ah, would it be a beautiful thing. If Apple wanted to, it could give us the best (pocketable) camera that ever was conceived. Wouldn’t you want the iCamera?

The camera function is not the number one criterion for buying a new smartphone. The screen size currently is probably the biggest driver. But for some buyers the camera is the most important thing and for many buyers its a critical factor. The latest survey of Japanese smartphone buyers by the CIAJ last year found that 37% of Japanese buyers felt that a good camera was a major decision element. If we say that only for half of that it is a deciding element (18%) and extrapolate globally, then the current iPhone series will not be considered by 270 million smartphone buyers this year 2015. Of course that would include the full price range so for a 50 dollar smartphone (unsubsidised price) even a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash can be considered a ‘great’ camera haha. But yes, if the premium end is say 40 million units of serious cameraphones, those will go to Lumia, Xperia, Galaxy, etc buyers this year. And if Apple offered us an iCamera, half of that market (premium cameraphone segment) at least would flock to the latest iGadget and feel its iBliss.

WHAT OF NIKON, CANON, OLYMPUS ETC

Yes, I’d buy that cameraphone (without the IR see-through walls and dual camera 3D unnecessary geeky nonsense) in a heartbeat from Apple. Or those specs if it was on a cameraphone from Canon on Android. Or from Panasonic or Nikon or Olympus. I’d buy it from Sony or LG or Lenovo/Motorola. Any brand. Even any ‘lesser’ tech brand like say an Asus (Asus is doing an optical zoom camera soon but it won’t be anything like this haha) or even a total unknown brand like haha Xiaomi or TCL or Oppo or a discount local brand like Micromax or Lava or Karbonn. I would fly to another country to buy it (as long as it ran Android, not Windows Phone haha). But even if you are Canon or Nikon or Panasonic, and did the full shebang of everything I said, on Android, they could not achieve 20 million or even 10 million sales in the first TWO years. Why? Carrier relations. Nobody other than Apple or Samsung could do this at this kind of scale (and Samsung has stumbled royally on the nearest thing to this iDream).

Yes, that would be the tech darling - of the CAMERA world which for all practical purposes amounts to less than nothing. In the smartphone world, its the big handset brands who have the distribution who could only pull this off. From a camera brand it might sell well - in camera terms - and most of us would never see one in the wild, and most press would be blissfully ignorant of its very existence. The handset makers could do better for the Top 10 guys, LG or Huawei or Sony etc, but not to this scale. And if the production run is only 1 million per year, does that justify all the effort it takes, when all parts cost more and this needs now ‘real’ marketing expenditure of huge scale.

Remember only Apple can pull this off ‘for free’ with truly zero marketing expense. Where the total worldwide publicity would hyperventilate about the iCamera every day for 12 weeks until it finally hits the stores and people stand in line overnight. Only Apple has that effect on the media. And even Apple can’t achieve that on the version 7 relaunch of an iPhone. It only happens on genuinely a new iGadget type, like the iPad or yes, now an iCamera. So only Apple can do this full idea. Others could try (and camera brands SHOULD try) but it would be very costly in the launch marketing which Apple would get for free. Remember.. ALL professionals in the visually oriented arts including TV, movies, cameras (newspapers, magazines), advertising - all love Apple and will utterly go gaga, oh so gaga, radio gaga, lady gaga, over this iCamera.

Ok that is my iFantasy. What do you think?

And yes, we’ll do part 3 tomorrow when we think what could/should other brands than Apple do with the cameraphone segment. What could the stand-alone camerabrands do on say an Android smarphone and what ‘obvious’ innovations are kind of missing from any generic ‘flagship’ cameraphone/smartphone. But today, lets talk iCamera. Is that now also you iDream?

For those who want to read more about the tech details of cameraphones and how they relate to pictures, here is my definitive blog about the top cameraphones of the world today. If you'd like to see stats on digital cameras, digital pictures and cameraphones, I did a huge statistical compendium last year. And if you are more interested in the handset industry itself, here are my latest stats and the link to my latest statistical ebook.    

In Search of the Ultimate Cameraphone: What is out there now, best of class, and what might we expect from upcoming iPhones, Lumias, Sonys and Galaxies; the definitive cameraphone blog for shutterbugs and pixelnerds (updated)

Ok lets talk cameraphones. I’ve been wanting to write this blog for a long while but I also wanted to do the topic justice. This is my ‘definitive’ analysis of what is the status of the ‘top camera’ handset as in ‘cameraphone’ segment of the industry. I will discuss various technical aspects of the techology itself and its evolution, and will make predictions about what we can expect from the four main ‘camera’ leaders of the handset market. So for example I will explain why we should not expect Xenon flash onto an iPhone or an optical zoom onto Lumia series. Also I will explain why there is a total break between the true ‘cameraphone’ devices in the world and the ‘premium/luxury phones with good cameras’ rivals. The distintion has become quite drastic in recent years. Oh, and I’ll toss in tons of personal anecdotes and occasional photography tips etc so this is gonna be a long long article - which I will decorate for you with many illustrations including pictures.

UPDATE 13 Feb 2015 - I will just mention briefly, spotted this rare consumer tidbit today: According to Comtech 2014 study, the third most important criterion in consumers buying a phone today is the camera, ahead of screen or battery life, and behind only 4G/LTE connectivity and reliability/durability. So just as an observation here, about was my blog relevant to the industry when I posted it last month haha.. Now please continue reading..

Lets then do some immediate disclosures. None of the pictures that I show will be taken with the iPhone 6 Plus or a Sony Xperia Z3 or a Microsoft Lumia 1020. The pictures are mostly taken with the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom or a Nokia 808 Pureview. When I need to illustrate a photographic concept and how it applies to the technology in those devices, I will use a mock-up out of an existing picture, and show only that aspects, that this is how x tech would appear in the Z3 or in the 6 Plus or the L1020 etc. I will be using usually the same photograph which has been manipulated (typically edited/cropped) to illustrate a given technical ability. It was still shot either on the K Zoom or the 808PV.

Secondly, this blog will be limited to ONLY the camera side of these premium/flagship smartphones. I will not look at any other issues that don’t apply to the picture-taking directly. So yeah, that given phone might have an awesome app store or be a delight to use or have a mobile wallet or include a built-in microwave oven and cappuccino-maker for example but we won’t care in this article. This is long enough as it is, the ONLY part I will discuss today - and to which all comments will be LIMITED is the picture-taking ability of the main camera.

So yes, we can also shoot video on the phones. Big whooptedoo. Much of what makes a good camera also makes a good videocamera so most of this article will be relevant to at least some degree about video, but not everything. And the camera ability is not all you need in video (important for example ,is sound recording which doesn’t apply to pictures). Video is another topic for another time. As is the selfie-cam. We won’t bother to consider how ‘complete’ a given cameraphone is for its other cameras. This is only about the main camera. That feature, which most people use more than the selfie cam. And on that camera, we only focus on taking pictures, as most people still today, take far more pictures than videos. We will also ignore other types of uses like videocalling or scanning barcodes or using the camera as a measurement tool etc. We limit it now to act ‘as a camera’ in a traditional sense. To take pictures.

And on those disclosures I am an ex-Nokia employee (left Nokia in 2001) and as a Finn I certainly will have a bias in favor of my old employer (even where Microsoft now owns their handset business). I currently use the Galaxy K Zoom which I bought with my own money (ie it was not given to me) and that tells you a lot about my choice of currently best cameraphone I must be biased in favor of Samsung too as I often use their products (such as typing this blog on a Samsung Ultrabook laptop). As to Sony the second most used phone brand I’ve ever owned is Sony(Ericsson). Need I specify that I’ve owned more Nokia phone devices than all other brands added together. But back to Sony. I loved my Xperia Z1 (for which I also had the accessory camera zoom lens the DX10) and am considering buying another Xperia to be perhaps my next phone. It would be in my second pocket however, as I will not give up the K Zoom as my primary phone for now (until a better cameraphone might come along).

As to iPhones, I am an old Macintosh user and trainer and I love Apple but I’ve never bought an iPhone. They were good phones that became great phones but where every smartphone is a compromise, the iPhone had consistently sacrificed exactly where I most appreciated a rivals’ ability such as a real QWERTY keyboard like Blackberries and older Nokia Communicators etc, and obviously cameras. I’ve owned every generation of the best cameraphone that existed. So, now that you know this blog will be pure anti-Apple hatered and continuous Elop-bashing of Microsoft and Nokia, lets get started.

PROLOGUE

This year marks 40 years since I got serious about photography, worked a summer job, and used my savings to buy my first serious camera. In 1975 there was no such thing as DSLR, the digital camera didn’t exist. That was when the top cameras were ‘merely’ SLR cameras. Single Lens Reflex is what SLR means, and that meant, that differing from other cameras at the time the way you ‘aimed’ the camera, in an SLR your view came through the lens that you were using (via mirrors). Then when you snapped your picture for a fraction of a second, the mirror would flip away, open a shutter, and expose the film. Then the mirror returned so you could see again, to take your next picture. Most other cameras had viewfinders that were above and to the side of the lens, so you would always aim slightly away from the exact photography target (called a parallax view and parallax error). The great benefit of SLR was as increasingly cameras were sold with lenses that the photographer could switch, the photographer could always see through the lens for what kind of image was being ‘seen’ through that specific lens vs another.

These were cameras for professionals and serious amateurs (much how DSLRs are today. The D in DSLR means digital, so DSLR cameras have similar construction but use a digital sensor instead of film). So yeah, in 1975 I got serious and bought myself a ‘proper’ camera, a Konica Autoreflex T3 and a Konica Hexanon 50mm F/1.4 standard lens to go with it. I would later save more money and buy the Hexanon 80-200mm zoom lens for it and an increasing array of gadgets, until I switched over to Canon and was a Canon guy for about 3 decades. Now, before I turned 15, I had dabbled in photography and next year 2016 marks the 50 year anniversary for me and my first camera. It did take 6 years from that lucky moment of receiving my first functional camera, however, that I took my first picture with my own camera, because at age 6, I was not rich enough to buy my own film (or to afford to develop it and print pictures). And by age 11, I had graduated from that very first functional camera without film, to my second real camera, a Kodak Instamatic 300 and I was finally rich enough to afford one or two rolls of film per year (and shooting totally ruined pictures of mere blur and confusion).

But lets do the tech love in a postscript to this blog article for those who would like to take that journey down memory lane with me. Suffice it to say, I’ve been rather serious about my cameras for a long time. Longer than many who read this blog have been alive. And once I started, I went all in. That summer 1975 when I worked at the Philips warehouse in Espoo Finland, it was my first paid summer job. It took most of my summer vacation (a considerable sacrifice) and my salary barely paid for the Konica that I then bought. Yes, I was getting very serious about this passion.

But think about this article a bit. I am writing on a computer. I write fast, but I also make a lot of typos (as regular visitors to this blog know all too well). For that we have a lovely technology solution - spellcheck - that could nearly eliminate any spelling errors in my writing. I’m just too lazy to bother to spell-check this blog. But there are plenty of automatic writing aids that help make better written output including spell-checking software that helps with grammar and even syntax. You know this of course but here is my point. That kind of software can only fix errors, it can’t put in text where none exists. So yes, it might spot a word thats missing or even some words. But even if some artificial intelligence algorithm studied all my writing including the millions of words in this blog and half a million in my books, no logic in the world could have inserted several paragraphs of text about spell-checking into an article written by tech blogger Ahonen about cameras in phones. So yes, computers and software can help fix errors. They cannot create where nothing exists to fix. This will become important in the story later on, obviously. Now lets talk about

THE FOUR BIG BRANDS

There are tons of good or interesting handset makers. I want to keep this article as short as possible (but cover all relevant issues of cameraphones in one comprehensive blog) so I have decided to pick ‘the’ four brands of most valuable insight. They are the four familiar names. First up, the world’s largest handset maker, largest smartphone maker, largest camera manufacturer and largest cameraphone maker, Samsung. Their best cameraphone is the Galaxy K Zoom.

The world’s second largest phone maker, second largest cameraphone maker, second largest cameramaker, but not a Top 10 smartphone maker, is the Nokia handset unit that Microsoft just bought last year. The Nokia brand is also the world’s most used camera brand and they never made any stand-alone cameras. so all of that was achieved only via cameraphones. The top cameraphone from the (Nokia) Microsoft offering is the Lumia 1020.

The world’s third largest cameramaker - who make more cameras than all stand-alone cameras sold per year - and world’s third largest handset maker and world’s second largest smartphone manufacturer is Apple. Did you know Apple actually launched the world’s first consumer digital camera, long long before anyone had heard of an iPhone. Yes. The Apple Quicktake 100 was the world’s first digital camera sold to consumers as far back as 1994. It never gained big success but now as Apple’s iPhone will pass Microsoft/Nokia soon and becoming the world’s second best-selling camera brand, that is a wonderful achievement over at Apple, thank you for launching the digital camera revolution 21 years ago, Apple! If iPassion runs in your iVeins the only cameraphone for you can be the iPhone 6 Plus.

And the fourth entrant I will add, is the only company that had a thriving camerabusiness before the cameraphone was invented and who still today offer leadership in stand-alone cameras. It is of course Sony who has been offering us (slightly) waterproof cameras that can be used briefly at a swimming pool (but can’t be taken for example on diving expeditions). Now Sony is not the fourth biggest phone maker or smartphone maker but as Sony also sells stand-alone cameras under the Cybershot brand, Sony is somewhere around 5th largest cameramaker in the world today when counting its smartphones and Cybershot stand-alone cameras. Not just for itself, Sony is also a major camera tech provider to the whole industry, in fact THREE of the four best cameraphones I included today, have Sony technology at the core of the camera side. So from Sony obviously I am including their flagship Xperia Z3. The two others that use Sony sensors inside their top cameraphones are Samsung Galaxy K Zoom and ... did you know this ... all iPhones sold today have Sony camera sensors, so the iPhone 6 Plus yes uses a Sony sensor. Its not the same sensor in all the phones, but lets not get ahead of ourselves, that will be coming.

So yes, you may love your LG or HTC or Xiaomi or whatnot, but I have to keep this to a reasonable length. These are the four top dogs we will consider. So then lets start with the theory. And go a bit back into history.

THE SENSOR IS LIKE FILM USED TO BE

Back in the film days of photography, there was a wide range of film that was manufactured for various uses. For consumers there were film types for cameras, that included black-and-white film, color picture film, and color film for slides. There were also some more exotic film stock from X-ray film to motion picture film. And there were several manufacturers with Kodak, Agfa, Fuji and Polaroid as the major film providers, plus some smaller brands. Polaroid only made film for its own cameras, the other makers made (mostly) film that was not specific to any one camera brand and was on standards like 35mm, 110 cartridge, 126 cartridge etc. Film also came in sensitivity, some film was very sensitive to light and was good for low-light situations while other film was not as sensitive and was intended for use in strong sunlight etc.

Obviously if you bought a roll of black-and-white film in 35mm size, you could stick it into any 35mm camera, and it always gave you black-and-white pictures. Then you needed another (usually more expensive, until the very end of film days) film to take color pictures. And if you wanted very sensitive film to work in very low light conditions, that was available but would again cost more, whether in black-and-white or in color formats.

Today all digital cameras shoot color and some can manipulate the pictures to turn them into black-and-white or you can use photoshop or any clones to turn color pictures into black-and-white, if thats your thing (I’ve shot so much B/W simply to save money, literally thousands of photographs, that I hate the format and refuse to see any artistic merit in doing B/W pictures or films in any other uses except if one wants to mimick a historical picture or film). But there is a strong parallel on the sensor, its quality, and image quality. So lets just explore film a bit more. So yeah, I mentioned 110 film cartridge (some readers will remember those) and 35mm and 126 cartridge. These were the three most popular film types by volume sold in 150 years. 35mm is named based on the size of the image on the negative 35mm x 23mm in size. 126 was smaller and 110 smaller still. The 110 film cartridge used a much more narrow negative stock that produced images the size of 17mm x 13mm in size on the processed negative, ie one quarter the size of 35mm film. This had a direct impact on the technical ability of film to store detail of an image. It would not be visible in a normal-sized photograph, but if you enlarged a picture to say page-size, then the quality of (similar spec) 35mm film was already noticeable vs 110 cartridge and if you enlarged further to poster-size, the difference was glaring.

Size matters (and yes, this becomes very important to modern cameraphones in just a moment, be patient). So there were also cameras that had larger film than 35mm cameras, most famous of the large format cameras is Hasselblad. And 110 was not the smallest film either. If you’ve seen spy movies from the past century, the pocket camera they used is a Minox which at first used a film with picture frames on the negative as small as 9mm x 6.5mm. Only 1/16th the size of the picture on a negative of 35mm. You could still take pictures but they were very ‘grainy’ ie you could physically see the grains of film elements as you produced pictures out of Minox camera film. Much how like if you try enlarging pictures made by very modest-resolution digital cameras like VGA resolution of 1mp resolution etc. Except that with digital cameras we see square-shaped pixels. But similar concept.

THE SENSOR SIZE RACE

So lets start our analysis of modern top cameraphones. And you do have to start where film left off, at the sensor. The digital camera sensor replaced that part of the camera that used to be done with film. The easy and superficial comparison of digital cameras is a count of megapixels. And megapixels do count, and I will count them eventually, but it doesn’t start with megapixels. It starts with size. The physical size of the sensor. Exactly like with film, the size of the sensor dictates a lot about the total quality of the image to be made. And what do I mean size if not megapixels. I mean physical size, length times width. The size of the camera sensor inside your iPhone 6 Plus is 4.8mm x 3.6mm (yes, in inches, that is less than 1/5 of an inch long and a little more than 1/8 of an inch wide). This by the way is an improvement over the size of the previous sensor Apple used, which was only 4.5mm x 3.4mm in size. So that was a growth of 13% in 2013 on the 5 series of iPhones vs the first 8mp sensor in the iPhone 4S. The 6 series uses the same Sony Exmor RS sensor now in the 6 and 6 Plus as it used in the 5S.

Bigger is better. Apple has already illustrated its interest in enlarging the sensor when it did so from the previous 8mp camera in the 4S. So the megapixel count remained the same, but the size of the sensor grew. Why is that? Because a larger sensor can catch more light and photography is all about light.

Now how’s that sensor race then with the rivals? Well, my Samsung Galaxy K Zoom in my pocket also has a sensor by Sony, the same type and class as in the iPhone 6 Plus except its bigger and better. The Galaxy K Zoom has Sony’s IMX220 Exmor RS which is 65% bigger than the Sony Exmor RS sensor on the iPhones. Its size is 6.2mm x 4.6mm. So remember, we are not talking megapixels yet (although yes, there are more megapixels also in this sensor) nor about its quality in terms of sensitivity to light (which also is better of course). No, this is about size. How much light can the sensor capture. Remember by prologue to this blog article. Yes, we can create computer programs and algorithms to fix errors in the image collected - but only if there is light to be ‘corrected’. THEN we can try to correct it for any faults by a poor sensor or lens (or many of the mistakes by the photographer) but if there is no light, nothing that can be corrected by automation. Just like if I don’t write something, you can’t run a spell checker or grammar checker to fix errors in it.

So what about the Xperia X3? It has as we can guess, of course Sony’s Exmor series sensor too, and its not the inferior one on the iPhone 6 Plus, of course Sony’s own flagship also uses its best cameraphone sensor of today in that ‘20 megapixel class’ just like the Galaxy K Zoom, the IMX220 Exmor RS which is 65% bigger than that in the iPhone 6 Plus. So is this the ultimate? Not even close. The sensor in the Microsoft/Nokia Lumia 1020 is far larger at 8.8mm x 6.6mm, almost four times larger than the sensor in the iPhones today. And this is the king of the hill of all smartphones sold and manufactured today by any brand. To get bigger sensors you have to go to stand-alone digital cameras. But the Lumia 1020 does not have the largest camera sensor ever put inside a phone. That honor goes to the predecessor of the L1020, the Nokia 808 Pureview. Its sensor was 10.7mm x 8.0mm in size. Yes, Nokia actually shrunk the size of the sensor when it ‘upgraded’ its top cameraphone from 2012 to 2013. The megapixel count was kept the same - this is that ginormous 41 megapixel camera sensor (manufactured by Toshiba) but the physical size was reduced. I will get to why that was done. Note, that as no other cameraphone maker had a sensor at the time that was even 1/8 the size of the sensor inside the Nokia by 2013, Nokia could safely reduce this dimension and rest assured they still held the title through the end of year 2013 with the Lumia 1020 (as they did obviously).

Is this of significance? Yes. Its the single most important factor that drives up the cost of the whole camera. I will explain and illustrate in just a moment but lets just look a bit at the real world outside our little fiefdom of mobile phones, shall we. The first 8mp camera made by Canon was the EOS 20D in 2004. That camera had a sensor of the size of 22.5mm x 15mm. So yes, more than 4x bigger than the pinnacle we have seen in cameraphones in that Nokia 808 Pureview a decade later. That was the old Canon as it was getting serious about bringing digital cameras to professional photographers. How is Canon today? They have grown the sensor from that. The most expensive Canon camera body you can buy today is the EOS DX1 that costs about 7,000 dollars (body only, so you have to pay more to get a lens for it). This is the current Canon flagship camera was launched in 2012. The sensor has 18 megapixels (note many cameraphones have more megapixels) but its sensor is 36mm x 24mm. Yes. The sensor on the top professional Canon camera is literally 50 times larger than the sensor inside current iPhones. Or to put it another way, the size of the iPhone sensor is only 2% the size of the rival sensor inside a Canon EOS DX1. Is there room to grow? You betcha.

If you think that a ‘pro camera’ is not a fair comparison for such ‘hobbyist’ uses of cameras as a cameraphone and it should rather be compared to point-and-shoot cameras, then yes. Lets take the King Kong of point-and-shoot cameras today. Thats the Sony Cybershot RX1 (a fixed focus, ie not even zoom, standalone point-and-shoot camera that came out in 2013 and costs .. get this .. 2,800 dollars. Four iPhone 6s or one Sony Cybershot RX1 haha). That camera sensor is 36mm x 24mm in size! Yes, size matters. Bigger is better. And out of the four cameraphones we are considering today, the iPhone 6 Plus is the dog of this category, totally holding the rear. All three other cameraphones have a bigger sensor. The biggest is with the Lumia 1020 so one win for Microsoft(Nokia). Let me show the sensors roughly in scale.




This image approximate size comparison by TomiAhonen Consulting January 2015
This image may be freely shared.

So yes, the iPhone 6P has the smallest sensor of our candidates for best cameraphone and this is an area that Apple has increased sensor size so it knows bigger means better. Currently of our four contenders Samsung and Sony have the same size sensor while Microsoft/Nokia Lumia 1020 is the biggest currently made. The previous Nokia 808 Pureview sensor is the biggest there has ever been inside a cameraphone. Now lets put these in context of the current pro-end serious camera sensors.

This image approximate size comparison by TomiAhonen Consulting January 2015
This image may be freely shared.


The pink sensor is that in the first DSLR Canon camera that did 8 megapixels, the EOS 20D. The outermost grey sensor is the 'full frame' 35mm film equivalent size sensor of 36mm x 24mm that is in the most expensive Canon DSLR currently, the EOS DX1. This shows how puny the cameraphone sensors are when compared to the current digital photo champs.

Canon and Sony have increased sensor sizes in their stand-alone cameras to improve quality and yes, Samsung, Apple and Sony in their smartphone ranges have also increased sensor sizes to get where we are today. And as they found their lead was too huge within the smartphone rival field, Nokia was able to actually shrink theirs and still safely hold the title for largest camera sensor of any smartphone. But let me also show these in real size (approximate) so you see how small they are. This is now approximately life size illustration:





This image approximate size comparison by TomiAhonen Consulting January 2015
This image may be freely shared.

(This display will depend on your screen. To see the real size, the length of the largest sensor in grey should be 36mm ie 3.6cm for European measures. For Americans, the height should be just slightly less than one inch)

So yes, the largest sensor (as in the Canon EOS DX1 professional DSLR camera and the Sony Cybershot RX1 top dog point-and-shoot camera) is 36mm x 24mm so length-wise that should be 36mm or 3.6cm. In inches thats nearly one and a half inches in length. To compare to the real world, its about the size if you take a credit card and cut it in half, and then half again. So four times that sensor is a bit less than the size of a standard Amex/Visa/MC credit card. That is the largest of these sensors. So if a bigger sensor really does mean better pictures and camera sensors have been growing, why are cameraphone sensors so small today? Ah, vanity is the reason.

WHY CAMERA SENSORS ARE SMALL IN PHONES

Now we need more illustrations and theory. I’ll try to keep this brief and show with illustrations. The size of the sensor is directly impacting the size of the optical elements ie the lens construction that any camera needs. So lets take the sensor first. Its (usually) a rectangle shape, and lenses are round. So the rectangle of the sensor determines the absolute minimum required size of the lenses that are used. The optical lens assembly must be of the size that it covers every corner pixel of the sensor, else those sensors won’t get light and will remain dark. Remember my analogy of fixing errors vs creating new content. There has to be light first. And thus, if you enlarge your sensor, the whole lens element has to be enlarged again (unless the lens was already large enough to fit you newer camera element. So for example Canon EOS lenses were designed for 35mm film. When Canon first offered the smaller digital sensor, the lenses were larger and of course filled the sensor fully, with light spilling past the sensor even. Then Canon had the chance to evolve its DSLR range to premium cameras with larger sensors, up to that 35mm film size, where they did with that 36mm x 24mm sensor size, which is exactly the maximum they could fit that used all available space of the existing EOS lens series).

Lets take an example. Here is a strongly enlarged illustration of the difference between the sensor in the iPhone 6 Plus (top picture, sensor in green) and the sensor in the Xperia Z3 and the Galaxy K Zoom (bottom picture, sensor in red).

Illustration by TomiAhonen Consulting January 2015
This image may be freely shared.

Note how much the circumfrence of the lens assembly grows because of the larger sensor. If your lens element is simple and small and heavily mass-produced, this is not a very costly change. This type of lens element costs somewhere around 25 dollars. But if we go to the 35mm range, one lens can easily cost 1,000 dollars. If you change lens sizes, the impact is huge. Immediately from that point everything in the camera becomes more expensive. Larger lenses require bigger motors to be moved (for auto-focus for example) which drain more battery life meaning bigger batteries, etc etc etc. But that was the frontal view. Let me now show why cameraphone makers hate larger sensors - and this is pure vanity. And I’m not talking of the singer Prince’s past girlfriend, popstar and movie star Vanity of Vanity 6.

 

 

 

Illustration by TomiAhonen Consulting January 2015
This image may be freely shared.

You see what a dramatic difference in the length of the lens assembly. (same colors for iPhone and Xperia, Nokia would be far worse..) Each lens becomes larger - and thicker, and their relative distances have to grow in exact same proportion as the diameter grew. This is why lenses on DSLR cameras are thick as coffee cups while similar lenses on pocket cameras are thin like shot glasses. And a longer lens assembly will penalize you where? In the silly race to make our smartphones thinner. Thin is sexy.

Oh, and exactly why is Apple still pushing thinner iPhones? Why is there a race for ever thinner phones? Seriously? Who said the iPhone 5S was ‘too thick’ and undesirably fat? What madness is this now? When consumers beg and plead for longer battery life or removable batteries or microSD card slots (and would love better cameras) Apple keeps on that pointless race to create the slimmest phone, to what end? For bendygate? Is this not madness when form supercedes function? Isn’t that a principle of bad design? Isn’t that creating an Alfa Romeo, gorgeous cars that are pretty useless as reliable motoring. Apple is on a slippery slope here. If they increased their sensor size, that would mean they’d have to also fit a longer lens assembly when already now there is no more room in the case, between the screen and the sensor and the lens assembly. There is literally no more room. If Apple shrink their phones further, they have to consider doing a ‘Camel hump’ on the phone back, like the 808 Pureview, Lumia 1020 and Galaxy K Zoom all have (but it wouldn’t be that huge obviously, Apple would make it modest at the worst).

So what do cameraphone makers do about this? They compensate with electronics and programming. There usually is some light, so they then have software to make a lesser sensor deliver still a good picture. The HDR feature is a recent step to partly remedy problems of weak sensors. HDR means High Dynamic Range and it only started to appear in top cameraphones in the past few years. Apple added it to the iPhone 5S already a year ago. Sony’s Xperia Z3 and the Galaxy K Zoom also have HDR, so here Apple has no advantage. The Lumia 1020 sensor is so much better it doesn’t need HDR as the pictures natively are captured with far more light.

THE ISO RACE

(The word ‘iso’ in Finnish means ‘large’ haha, funny coincidence). But yes just having a large sensor is not necessarily the best sensor. Camera sensors today are all CMOS type and as electronics there is considerable evolution in their technology. Consider the scale, there are more than 2 Billion camera sensors manufactured now annually (and growing). But you iFans, don’t bicker about this point, just eat it up. The camera sensor in the iPhone 6 Plus is Sony branded Exmor sensor but of the Exmor series its the cheapest and smallest and the similar Exmor type sensor in both the Galaxy K Zoom and Xperia Z3 is newer and bigger and more expensive. Don’t try to argue that the iPhone has a better sensor or even as good a sensor as the 65% larger sensor on the Sony and Samsung. And the size advantage with the Lumia 1020 is so enormous (for a very recent design sensor) that there is no contest there. But apart from size, there is a qualitative measure of camera sensors and that is the sensitivity to light. A good sensor has the ability to be more sensitive to light, ie it can capture more light in poor lighting conditions. This is measured as an ISO number (the higher the better).

The ISO number is dependent on the camera sensor not other parts of the camera design and componets. Its a native ability of the sensor itself. So the Sony Xperia Z3 and Samsung Galaxy K Zoom have the same ISO rating because they use the same sensor. But lets start with the iPhone. The 6 Plus and its older smaller (weaker) Sony Exmor sensor has a maximum ISO rating of 2,000. That is nice and its a big improvement over the first iPhone with 8mp sensor, the iPhone 4S which had a sensor with sensitivity of an ISO of only 800. So how’s the newer Exmor sensor then on the rival Sony powered cameraphones? That ISO goes up to 3,200. Yes, better quality sensor still on both the K Zoom and the Z3. How’s the Nokisoft Microkia Lumia 1020? Well, that awesome sensor is so sensitive to light its ISO rating is 12,800. Totally dwarfs these three rivals.

Is this a bogus measure, how is the proper cameraworld outside of phones? That Sony Cybershot RS1 has an ISO rating twice of the Lumia 1020 at 25,600. What about the super pro shooters with a Canon EOS DS1? Its - ahem - a little bit better than that even. Its ISO rating is 202,000. Yes literally 100 and one times more sensitive to light than an iPhone 6 Plus. Yes, I think we still have a way to go before cameraphones catch up with proper cameras haha. The iPhone 6 Plus of today has barely caught up with the world of film 30 years ago when Kodak sold consumer color film with a 1000 ASA (ISO) rating and black-and-white film with 1600 ASA (ISO) rating. The Sony and Samsung have moved a bit beyond that world but the Lumia 1020 is far far ahead of film-based cameras on the sensor sensitivity. The Lumia 1020 is giving a very serious run for the money on this aspect, of most consumer point-and-shoot cameras which aren’t as potent as the awesome Cybershot RS1. To move well above the Lumia you have to go to the pro-end of the DSLR cameras of Nikon and Canon and their rivals. Nokia/Microsoft clearly wins also this round and iPhone 6 Plus comes again holding the tail end.

PIXEL FUN

Lets do the megapixels, Lumia has 41mp. Xperia Z1 and Galaxy K zoom have 20mp. The iPhone 6 Plus has an underwhelming 8mp. Is this something that will change? Apple raised its megapixel count from 2mp to 3mp to 5mp to 8mp. All other major camera makers keep pushing up the megapixel count of their top cameras and so do also all cameraphone makers. There is very much more to cameras than megapixels but on megapixels, the iPhone 6 Plus is severely behind the times. And why would/should you care? Isn’t 8mp ‘enough’? Haha yeah, sure, and thats just as much ‘enough’ as 1 megabyte was supposed to be enough for running any computer operating system according to Bill Gates early in the PC evolution haha. No. 8mp is going to seem quant in a few years just like how small and puny 1mp and 2mp pictures look nowadays. But lets take one practical example. Displaying the photographs. Here yes, 8mp is plenty. These are some premium screen options today:

A Macbook Pro 15” screen is 2880 x 1800 in size ie a 5.2mp picture
A Macbook Air 13” screen is 1440 x 900 in size ie a 1.3mp picture
An iPad has a 2048 x 1536 screen so its 3.1mp in picture size
The iPhone 6 Plus retina display is 1920 x 1080 or 2.1mp in size

If you’re not an iGeek, then for example my Samsung Ultrabook has a screen of 1920 x 1080 ie 2.1mp

If you have a standard HD television, its screen is .. yes .. 1920 x 1080 (2.1mp) as are screens of several flagship smartphones nowadays like Xperia Z3.

So don’t worry, currently 8mp is just about enough on all screens. If you only view digital images on electronic screens, then yes, today a camera with 8 megapixel sensor is about enough. Not great, but enough. However, at some point you may want to print out a picture (or maybe one of your friends wants to print a picture you took).

PRINT EXPOSES PIXELS

So what happens if you want to print out a picture? Then we do get into dpi resolutions (Dots Per Inch, a measure of printer image density, the more the sharper). It is recommended that photographs are printed at 300 dpi so that the print is so fine that the dots don’t show. Some prefer 400 dpi but most believe that 300 dpi is kind of the print equivalent of ‘retina display’ ie the human eye won’t detect the dots, so essentially its the limit of how accurate prints would need to be to be considered of high print quality. Lets see how they work with our digital images then.

Normal ‘photograph’ sized pictures like you see in the photo albums of your grandparents, either 3x5 inch or 4x6 inch size, are perfectly fine for the 8mp cameraphone. A 4x6 photograph printed at 300 dpi will only consume 2.2mp of pixels. So you can even crop your iPhone picture into four quarters, and print any one of those four and it still looks perfectly sharp on pictures that small. But lets enlarge a bit.

A magazine page is pushing your 8mp iPhone 6 Plus image to below 300dpi to fit the page. An normal magazine page at A4 page size (European measures, US measures slightly differ of course) is 3543 x 2480 pixels. Thats 8.8mp. For a perfectly sharp print, yes you can enlarge your iPhone picture but only up to one page size of a normal magazine, like say Time Magazine. That page size. Thats what you can do, no larger. If you print larger than that, the lack of image detail starts to become noticeable, the bigger the worse. How far can my Galaxy K Zoom or the Xperia Z3 go with 20mp image detail density? A full spread magazine (two pages) runs 17.6 megapixels. That is how much more these pictures can deliver.

What about the Lumia 1020? Its 41 megapixel sensor does not deliver pictures at 41mp (we’ll talk about why, later). It is actually not a 41mp sensor in the same way as the others, its actually a ‘convertible’ sensor that can run either 38mp or 34mp in pictures it produces but not 41. So lets take the smaller of the two which is the 16x9 resolution format, and that is almost exactly matching a four-page mini-poster size. Imagine four iPads laid in a rectangle. A printed page poster of that size can be produced from a Lumia 1020 picture without the human eye detecting any dots. So let me give you here a nice handy table to show 300dpi print outputs and some common print sizes, because I know my readers are dying for this info, right?:

TABLE OF PRINT SIZES CONVERTED TO MEGAPIXELS (printed at 300dpi)
Standard photograph 3x5 = 1500 x 900 pixels = 1.4mp
Standard photograph 4x6 = 1800 x 1200 pixels = 2.2mp (this is also standard postcard size)
One magazine page (A4) = 3543 x 2480 pixels = 8.8mp
One magazine spread (2xA4) = 4960 x 3543 pixels = 17.6mp
Three piece foldout (3xA4) = 7440 x 3543 pixels = 26.4mp
Mini poster 4 panels (4xA4) = 7086 x 4960 pixels = 35.1mp
Poster 8 panels (A1) = 9920 x 6968 pixels = 69.1mp
Bus stop poster 180cm/6 feet tall = 21,300 x 14,200 pixels = 301.3mp
Table by TomiAhonen Consulting January 2015
This table may be freely shared.

Mind you, that 7,000 dollar Canon top-shelf super pro camera with its 18mp sensor cannot do this resolution detail. It can only do the 2 page spread. If the pro camera dude wanted to shoot a poster, he’d have to do it by taking several pictures and then stiching them together to get his large print (similar to how panorama picture works on your iPhone 6 Plus and in fact all four of these cameraphones. But that pro won’t bother with that, he’d just shoot film for a poster sized image, possibly with a Hasselblad or something superduper fancy haha.) Print is about pixel density so here the megapixels rule. Nokia I mean Microsoft wins AGAIN? iPhone 6 Plus is last again. On this count the Xperia Z1 and Galaxy K Zoom are literally exactly twice as good as the iPhone 6 Plus. The Lumia is then nearly twice as good as the shared silver-placed finishers. Incidentially on pixel counts there is nothing that the iPhone can do to add pixels when none exist. This is again the problem of you can fix errors with software, but can’t create from nothing.

So here is my first forecast about camera evolution. Canon and Nikon will continue to grow their pixel count of their top professional cameras into the 24mp and beyond range. Look at that print table. Currently a ridiculously expensive pro camera can’t do even a 3-page foldout (think of Playboy centerfolds haha). Because of what we heard and read about sensor size, the pro camera DSLR segment sensor size has reached its natural growth ceiling because the lenses can’t grow to be bigger. So the sensors will remain 36mm x 24mm in size but their pixel counts. You can count on those growing and growing. Every few years. Good excuse for those boys to then peddle newer fancier superduper premium cameras.

WHEN IS 8MP NOT 8MP

So then another shocker. Yes your iPhone 6 Plus does totally honestly measure and collect an image of 8mp in size (technically actually the exact count is 7.99mp). But that is only when you shoot pictures in 4x3 mode. If you want to shoot 16x9 you know what happens? And no iBashing here, almost all cameras, cheap and expensive see this same phenomenon. The 16x9 format picture has less pixels. About 1/4 less. If you select pictures in 16x9 format, their size is not 8mp, its 6mp. If I select pictures on the Galaxy K Zoom to 16x9 they are no longer 20mp, they’re only 15mp. This is true all the way to the supercameras I mentioned. Exactly the same phenomenon. The sensor is the same. Its been designed so that the maximum rectangle fits inside the circle (which is 4x3 format, not 16x9). And this is what you get:





Illustration by TomiAhonen Consulting January 2015
This image may be freely shared.

Yes. Just like how when we used to watch wide-screen movies on old style TV sets, there were those black lines on the top and bottom of the TV screen to create the wide-screen movie effect, similarly the sensor just dumps pixels to create the 16x9 image for you and me and every other person on (almost) every camera and cameraphone.

So yes, if you shoot pictures in 4x3 format, you do get 8mp and I do get 20mp. But if you prefer to use the 16x9 picture format, for example, to use as screen savers on your laptops or phones etc, its not 8mp you get, its 6mp. And I only get 15mp. Its still far more than the screens of most uses (although now the Macbook Pro is getting awefully close..). But the same goes for prints of the images - now that table of printing looks far more perilous for the iPhone 6 Plus is we start at 6mp pictures in a print page size, nearer to 16x9 than 4x3.

Which brings me to a pro tip. Always shoot in 4x3 format and highest resolution of your cameras whatever they are. You can always edit them down to 16x9 later if and when you want, but this gives you a bit of editing latidude, while you can’t make your pictures wider, you can select how high or low to have the horizon for example, AFTER the picture is taken and you can take your time to edit the image. But if you shot 16x9 you can never go back to the larger image and the camera sensor always is collecting the full 4x3 image, but then just discards the unused pixels if you don’t want it. Memory today is so cheap that you should not worry at all about the slightly larger files you create this way, just collect the highest resolution and largest images you can, then you have more material to use when you use our pictures and you can edit them later with more flexibility if you collected the biggest image possible in terms of pixels.

CAN THIS BE DONE BETTER

(Some of my readers know what is coming next.) So, the sensor size has a drastic negative effect on the desire to keep smartphones narrow and slim because larger sensor means larger diameter lenses which means longer lens construction which obstructs the mad rush to create paperthin smartphones. Well, we now know the formula that a 4x3 picture is full megapixel count and 16x9 is about 75% of the megapixels. When I tell you that the 4x3 image on the Nokia-Microsoft Lumia 1020 is 38mp in size, you can now calculate that the 16x9 image is 28.5mp in size, right? The rules of sensor sizes and image formats. Ironclad rule applies to all cameras not just cameraphones. All the way up to 2,500 dollar point-and-shoots and 7,000 dollar pro cameras. So what is the Lumia 1020 size for 16x9 pictures (and also same for the 808 Pureview I still often use)? not 28.5mp. Its 34mp. Yes. 34mp for 16x9. And if so, shouldn’t the 4x3 then be 45mp? Yeah if it was normal sensor technology it should. But Nokia has discovered a way to get a larger 16x9 image out of a sensor that still fits a smaller cylinder. And what could be this magic trick? Its a cross-shaped sensor. A ‘fat cross’ like this:





Illustration by TomiAhonen Consulting January 2015
This image may be freely shared.


So yeah, that is to illustrate ‘fat cross’. The Nokia sensor is not that ‘thin’ haha and only if I first show you that, can you discover the ‘cross’ also in this actual sensor SHAPE of the 808 Pureview and Lumia 1020. The ‘pureview’ sensor. It is yes a cross shape while extremely fat cross indeed. This is the Pureview sensor shape:




Illustration by TomiAhonen Consulting January 2015
This image may be freely shared.


So the corners are chopped off. That means this weird-shape sensor fits into a smaller circle than a full rectangle of the same size, right? And because the primary use of cameraphones today is to shoot pictures in landscape mode increasingly in 16x9 and that is how all videos are also shot, Nokia discovered that this sensor creates by far the largest 16x9 images while retaining nearly as big 4x3 images as well. So let me now show you how it works. The one sensor has to be always selected either you want 4x3 images (at 38mp) or 16x9 images (ar 34mp). If you select 4x3 the sensor uses these parts and rejects the rest:

 

Illustration by TomiAhonen Consulting January 2015
This image may be freely shared.

And if you select 16x9 'wide' image, you don't lose the parts of the image that are gone in all other sensors, rather you get a wider image which uses these parts of the 'fat cross' shaped Pureview CMOS sensor:






Illustration by TomiAhonen Consulting January 2015
This image may be freely shared.

So the sensor is a ‘convertible’ that does either the yellow or the green shape. Does this help. Look at this image now here below to compare the traditional way and the 'fat cross' solution. Let me show you how much Nokia saved when using 16x9 images. Now of course the sensor would be bigger than 41mp, yes 45mp in size (red rectagle). So I have drawn the circles of what is the required lens size for the same 16x9 image the conventional way (light grey circle) and the Nokia Pureview way (purple circle)
 

Illustration by TomiAhonen Consulting January 2015
This image may be freely shared.

Seriously folks, isn’t this awesome technical solution when you are trying to solve ‘my phone is too fat’ syndrome while sqeezing in a larger sensor. So the only cameraphones in the world (I believe the only CAMERAS in the world) that use a cross-shaped camera sensor are the two top cameraphones from Nokia, the 808 Pureview from 2012 and its successor the Lumia 1020 from 2013. NOTE: After I posted the early version of this blog, I learned from comment by Anon that this type of sensors did exist on some cameras before the Nokia 808 Pureview, so it was not a Nokia invention for the camera industry overall, only for the cameraphone industry.

Meanwhile back to the story... Other cameras that were branded Pureview by the idiot CEO and against the internal protestations of his staff who knew better, were not using this Pureview tech. But for maximum image sizes in 16x9 the most popular image type, the winner hands down is Lumia 1020. They do 16x9 images in 34mp when Galaxy K Zoom and Xperia X3 only can manage 15mp and the iPhone 6 Plus can only do 6mp. The Lumia image is almost 6 times more sharp in 16x9 resolution than the iPhone. And in 4x3 mode the Lumia delivers a bit more than 4x the image resolution. Winner hands down is again Lumia and the worst is iPhone 6 Plus.

WORLD’S BEST INDEED

So lets make this quick astounding observation here. The Lumia 1020 (and 808 Pureview) has a 41mp sensor that does 38 mp pictures in traditional 4x3 format and even more astonishing 34mp in the wide-screen modern 16x9 format. Obviously that is the best cameraphone for those resolutions but did you notice this.. The Lumia 1020 is better than any stand-alone point-and-shoot digital camera AND its better than ANY professional DSLR camera. Yes any. Better than the top Nikon D810 (36mp sensor built by Sony) that costs 3,000 dollars for just the camera body; better than the top Canon EOS 5D Mark 3 (22mp processor built by Canon) and costs 3,000 dollars also body only; or the Sony Alpha ILCE-A7 (36mp sensor built by Sony) which would be a bargain at 1,200 dollars including lens.

It used to be that if you wanted to go beyond a Nokia smartphone in your camera resolution you had to be friends with the NSA as no mass-produced cameras were that powerful and only the USA spy agency built cameras with higher digital resolutions - for their spy satellites haha. But from 2014 there is ONE option instead of 41mp, you can get to 50mp if you can afford 45,000 dollars. Hasselblad’s new H5D 200c does have a 50mp sensor. But you can buy a Microsoft-Nokia Lumia 1020 today for a discounted price (new) for about 400 dollars without contract, sim-free unlocked. And if you look hard, you can catch still the last 808 Pureviews for something like half that price. Who cares that it runs Symbian, what you want is the world’s best camera on that one metric of image detail ie pixel count, by literally any brand this side of a Hasselblad and costing less than very good car.

And yes please don’t write. There is OBVIOUSLY more to cameras than pixels, this article is clearly proof of that and I haven’t yet moved beyond the sensor haha. But we do need to make this point. If you want to take a picture today, with a digital camera, and you want maximum resolution ie detail. You want a group picture of 100 people where all faces are as sharp and clear as possible, or you want to take a landscape view where you can count the individual leaves on trees, or you want a cityscape view where you see each window in detail.. The most detailed digital camera in the world today, at a price that won’t threaten to put you into bankruptcy, costs LESS than an iPhone and carries a Nokia brand. The Lumia 1020 (and Nokia 808 Pureview) have that awesome sensor that does collect 38mp in 4x3 picture mode and 34mp in 16x9 landscape. The sharpest pictures possible (as long as the picture is shot in daylight and you used a tripod for stability). Get the most expensive Canon EOS DX1 and stick onto it their most expensive 28mm F/1.8 lens and take the picture from the same spot. Then elarge the two images and voila! Nokia has more detail.

The phone is such an amazing miracle for modern tech today, at such a ridiculously low price, that even if you hate Microsoft and Windows, that is worth the purchase simply as a gadget to stick into your camerabag. Next to your beloved Olympus or Panasonic or Leica or whatever is your camera of choice. Don’t bother looking for modern apps for the phone or using it as your primary smartphone. Just buy it now while it still exists, as the technical marvel that it is. Then whenever you take landscapes or cityscapes or group photos, thats the camera you will always use. Just like how I carry my 808 Pureview to all trips and whenever I anticipate I might want those great pictures of breathtaking views, those I shoot with the Nokia not the Galaxy K Zoom which I use for all other pictures. But it is an undeniable fact, that when it was released nothing came close and today, years after Nokia’s first 41mp sensor on what was a 600 dollar cameraphone, has finally been eclipsed by the Rolls Royce brand in cameras, who only make obsenely priced huge things, Hasselblad. And by how much? 50mp to 41mp. Or else, yeah, you can maybe buy yourself a spy satellite from the NSA.

A cameraphone is by definition a compromise as it combines two devices with only minimal overlap in utility - a mobile phone and a camera. For one cameraphone today to outperform even just on one specification ALL the digital cameras by all the major cameramakers that even true professionals use - and indeed one of the most important technical specs (remember people I did not say THE most important and its only one of many) that is an achievement worthy of a special mention prize. The Nokia Lumia 1020 is starting to run away with the best cameraphone distinction now at the early running of this blog article. Lets leave the sensor now after Nokia has biggest sensor (iPhone smallest), Nokia has most powerful sensor by ISO count (iPhone weakest) and Nokia having the biggest pixel count for most detailed photos (iPhone rather lame on this count).

And we can now make another forecast. Because they don’t want to increase the thickness of their phones, at least Nokia and Apple will focus on adding megapixels. Apple hate it when people call them out for being behind the pack (while they maintain a cool demeanor, this truly eats them inside). If they increase the physical size of their sensor there is a big thickness penalty to the iPhone handset itself. Megapixel count is easier to implement. And for Nokia a bit of a different reason. They don’t need to go for a bigger sensor currently as they’re so far ahead of the pack but that big sensor can accommodate plenty more sensors. What kind to expect. Apple should soon do a modest upgrade, hopefully this year to 13mp. 16mp would be a pleasant surprise. Nokia meanwhile the logical megapixel count upgrade would be to about 61 megapixels (allowing 2x zoom effect for pictures still 12mp in size). Samsung’s megapixel count depends on the internal dimensions of the K Zoom lens assembly. If there is room to grow, could go to 24mp. Else they might hold these sensor specs through the L Zoom or whatever is the next device in this family progression. Lets now move just a tiny sliver of distance from the sensor to...

SHUTTERING ABOUT SHUTTERS

So yeah. The shutter. What is the shutter. There is a kind of door on all film-based cameras that opens to show the light to the film and then closes. This ‘shutter’ determines how much light gets onto the picture, so the picture is not too dark (not enough light, keep the shutter open longer) or too washed out white (too much light, close the shutter faster). And modern digital cameras have digital sensors operated by electricity. Can’t we just turn off and on the sensor itself. Sure, that is called an ‘electronic’ shutter. Here the main technical problem is of electronic complexity, if you turn on and turn off the electronic shutter, you need that type of electronic extra control which for a camera with a mechanical shutter does not need. That type of camera can use the full power of the sensor simply to catch all the light it ever sees and not worry about the shutter-operation.

So the technically a better solution is a mechanical shutter and keeping the sensor always ready for all light available. But a mechanical shutter is an extra physical element that has to be inserted between the lens and the sensor. So if beauty and slimness is your desire, which option do you think cameraphones want? Yeah of course, the electronic shutter. And what do all pro cameras and serious stand-alone cameras have? Yeah, of course, they all have a mechanical shutter (and yes, there even is a hybrid solution, lets not bother with that complexity now). Top cameras have mechanical shutters. But we can’t just give points for ‘DSLR envy’ we do need to see if there is any practical utility out of this technology, other than that its work-around on electonic shutters requires some electronic complexity. Remember that the smartphone is an incredible supercomputer anyway, who cares if we happen to exchange some extra computing requirement, to balance against an unnecessary component.

So is it unnecessary? Haha, well, the one thing you can’t do with an electronic shutter is real proper flash. Cameraphones tend to have LED based flash, usually just one LED flash, some premium phones have now dual LED flash. But ‘real’ flash as in all hand-held pro flashguns and accessory flash units for stand-alone cameras including DSLR cameras and most of the flash units in any mid-price or premium point-and-shoot cameras are Xenon flash. Not LED flash. LED flash is like you turn on a spotlight, then take a picture, then turn off the light. Xenon flash is the thinnest slice of a second, from 1/10,000th of a second to as incredibly brief as 1/200,000th of a second burst of intense light. An electronic shutter cannot handle Xenon flash and some of the light sensors will not react in time so the picture is messed up, some pixels are correctly colored with light and others are dark. Unusable totally ruined pictures. Cannot be done (at least with modern sensors today). If you want real flash, you have to have a mechanical shutter. Thats the deal.

So iPhone 6 Plus, do you have a mechanical shutter. No. Samsung Galaxy K Zoom? Yes. Sony Xperia Z3? No. Nokia Lumia 1020? Yes. This is a make-or-break feature that differentiates proper cameras from toys. If you want a serious experienced camera user to accept the cameraphone as a ‘proper camera’ then here is one of those ‘must have’ elements. Proper flash ie Xenon flash. It has to operate with a real, mechanical shutter. Simple as that. So that eliminates the pretenders in this category but leaves two to contest for the crown.

But can we decide between the two? If you do have a mechanical shutter, is there any way to compare them, a shutter-specific metric that says which is the better unit in a given camera. Sure there is. Its called shutter speed. The better the camera the faster the top shutter speed. How is my lovely Galaxy K Zoom? Has a very nice (for a mid-price camera) top shutter speed of 1/2000 seconds. Then the Nokia Lumia 1020? Well it kinda runs away with this category, its shutter goes to 1/16,000 speed. So on shutter, Nokia wins, Samsung gets silver medal but there is no bronze medal at all. The Xperia and iPhone don’t qualify on this. But this is not a ‘very big deal’ by itself. If you have a mechanical shutter, then you do have to have Xenon flash, else there is no practical gain out of this technology. So we could group this next item as part of the same. BUT it IS a different spec. So lets do

WHO IS BRIGHTEST

The flash. There is Xenon flash as real flash and there is pretend flash as LED lighting. You can guess that the only reason Nokia and Samsung went through the trouble and expense and thickness-penalty of a physical shutter, was so they can add Xenon flash to their cameraphones. They both have it. And the two pretenders, Sony Xperia Z3 and iPhone 6 Plus do not. Now, on the Sony Xperia Z3 there is only single LED flash, so here is the first time we see the iPhone 6 Plus move from last place to second-from-last, as it does have dual LED flash. It is better than single LED. But for Xenon flash we do not have luminance measurement stats on the two top cameraphones, I can’t determine which might be better of the two, so we award dual Gold Medals (the first for Sammy) for Lumia and K Zoom with its first bronze for the iPhone and a last place for the Sony Xperia. Is this foretelling a change of fortunes?

But wait, before we go further, I should mention that because LED flash does weak light, here is another area where electronics and software matters a lot. As long as there is some light, if the cameraphone is very smart, it can adjust for very poor light and try to compensate. Again Apple iPhone 6 Plus is doing the best job at these kinds of compensations, because it obviously has to. The others have larger sensors, more sensitive sensors and except for Sony also real Xenon flash units. They don’t need to compensate as much. The difference between the leaders and the iPhone is not as severe as one might expect, but it is measurable and noticable nonetheless. On Xenon flash it is no contest, the light is far brighter, it is pure white, it is far far FAR shorter-duration, so it stops movement, that means pictures are crisp and clear. LED needs far longer exposures so picture get more blurry out of movement both of object and of photographer’s hand. Oh and perhaps most important, Xenon flash reaches further.

And now we are ready to make another forecast. Apple will not have Xenon flash on the iPhone. That would require adding a shutter assembly which would add bulk where Apple tries to put the iPhone on yet another diet. No, no mechanical shutters for iPhones and that means, yes, there will not be Xenon flash units in iPhones. Sony might do it but Apple won’t. So you might just as well stop wishing for it. Apple will improve the iPhone in other ways but if it needs more power for flash, expect a third LED rather than adding the space for the mechanical shutter needed to incorporate Xenon flash.

ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR LENS

So next out from the sensor we have the lens construction. Now, its not inherently true, that always more elements means a better camera lens but generally, of similar type of lens, and especially from the same manufacturer, more lens elements means a better lens and less elements is a worse camera lens. Again please don’t write, there will be plenty of exceptions. But look. Apple went form 4 elements in its iPhone camera lens to 5 elements when it introduced the 8mp camera on the iPhone 4S. 5 elements is near the top of most flagship class smartphones. The Xperia Z3 also has 5 elements. Nokia’s 808 Pureview came with 5 elements but Nokia bumped that up to 6 elements in the Lumia 1020. The Galaxy K Zoom runs away with this, partly as zoom lenses are more complex, it has 9 elements.

So Where are professional cameras going? That uber-point-and-shoot, Sony Cybershot RS1 has 8 elements in its fixed-focus (ie non-zoom) lens, so Nokia’s 6 elements is by no means the pinnacle. And if you feel like paying 740 dollars for a fixed-focus 28mm f/1.8 wide angle lens from Canon’s EOS line, their top 28mm wide angle lens does have 10 elements. The best lens construction goes to Galaxy K Zoom. Second place is Nokia. Tied for third are Sony and Apple. What about the lens material?

CLEAR AS GLASS

Best camera lens material is not plastic, it is glass. Cheap cameras have always plastic lenses. Yes, its possible to do good camera lenses out of plastic but that would require quite considerable skill and yes, no top lenses are made out of plastic. They are always of glass. How are our field? The iPhone lens unit is made by Taiwanese low-cost lens manufacturer, Largan Precision who switched from glass to plastic many years ago just to save money. Thats your iPhone guts in a nutshell. You know how much the total camera assembly for an iPhone 6 Plus costs including sensor and lens? Under 20 dollars including assembly. And Apple charges you 750 dollars for the device and can’t be bothered to spend a few dollars more for a glass lens assembly. Yeah, “world’s best” camera it certainly ain’t. Who has even HEARD of Largan Precision? Lets move on.

How is Sony Xperia Z3 lens material. Well the son of Cybershot brand is certainly going full glass optics on their flagship, on a lens assembly by Sony optics. Very high quality. What of Samsung Galaxy K Zoom? Plastic or glass in the fancy zoom apparatus? Its totally glass too, manufactured by Samsung’s camera division which also is a branded optics unit but not as illustrious as Sony’s Cybershot by brand. And how about our leader? Nokia’s Lumia 1020 is a mixture of glass and plastic in its lens material. Now the brand of all Nokia premium cameras is Carl Zeiss, arguably the best lens maker in the world, from Germany. While Sony makes its own lenses, you wanna know what brand is on the nose of that hyper-expensive point-and-shoot Cybershot RX1? Not Sony, that is labeled clearly and proudly as Carl Zeiss glass there, if you spend 2,800 for a fixed-focus point-and-shoot camera haha.. Even Sony admit Carl Zeiss do the best lenses. So Nokia/Microsoft/Lumia is in good company yes, but come on. The category was not who has the best supplier, it is what is the best construction material. Sony is all glass, Samsung is all glass, Nokia is only partly glass partly plastic. That takes the gold away from Lumia.

I’m going to make a jury’s decision here and award the best material for Sony ahead of Samsung simply because Sony has a longer more illustrious history making top cameras than Samsung. Samsung still gets a silver here. Nokia gets its first bronze medal and coming in last, where they already know their place seems to be, is the iPhone 6 Plus. So yes. Largan Precision does the lenses for your iPhones, and proudly in only plastic. Can that be the best cameraphone when all good cameras are done in glass and with branded optics masters in cameras? If Largan had suddenly discovered the secret to revolutionizing camera optics, they’d be known to everybody and Apple would proudly hail their name on the front of their cameras, like Nokia does Carl Zeiss for example. You might hope that Largan is better than its non-existent reputation, but its not the best lens-maker in the world. Once again the iPhone 6 Plus disappoints us.

WIDE WIDE WORLD OF WONDER

So lets see how the lenses compare. Lets start with the main use of the main camera, its wide-angle view. Cameraphones are by far most used in short distance pictures, often with groups of people, like birthdays, weddings, etc. Or then various pictures celebrating whatever famous tourist site etc that one happened to visit that day. They are not used generally for bird-watching or paparrazzi photos from a mile away. They are often used to try to take pictures at rock concerts and sporting events until the owners learn that the targets are so tiny that its pretty useless. So most pictures that tend to be taken, are typical short-range groups. The team sitting at Starbucks around the table, lets fit everybody into the picture, move over, move over, move over. Ok, say Cheese!

Lets do wide angle. I prepared a little illustration for you. First up, Apple iPhone 6 Plus. It has, what is called a ‘30 mm equivalent focal length’ wide-angle lens (lets not worry where that specification comes from, it is true, that is a metric, the smaller the number the wider the resulting picture. Wide angle lenses start from ‘35mm equivalent focal length’ and go down to ‘24mm equivalent focal length’. After 24mm at 21mm equivalent focal length start ‘fish-eye’ lenses of extreme wide angle, which distort the picture in that distinctive style, so fish-eye lenses tend not to be particularly popular as they don’t produce pictures that are accurate in terms of what we humans see normally.)

So lets imagine that you visited Singapore and you are staying at the fabulous Pan Pacific Hotel and you walk into your room and you see the view! And then you think, this has gotta be one of the best views in the world, so you reach into your pocket and you snap a picture of it of course. This is a simulated edit of a picture to illustrate a 30mm focal length picture taken of that view. This is what you’d get, gorgeous isn’t?




Picture by Tomi T Ahonen, you may use with attribution

Now your wife who works at Microsoft and has a Lumia 1020 as her work phone wanders in, is amazed at the view, and grabs her phone and snaps the picture too. This is the picture her camera takes.

Picture by Tomi T Ahonen, you may use with attribution

Yes? Yes! Her picture captured more of the scene. Quite a lot more in fact. She manages to get the whole building in front of you for a more dramatic picture than your iPhone could. If you tried to reframe the picture to match that of your wife’s it would cut the top of those pretty 3 hotels in the top left corner out of the frame. Hey? Whats going on? Aren’t all cameras the same? No. They are not. The simplest cheapest lenses to make are by focal length equivalent called ‘standard’ lenses at 50mm equivalent focal length. The more you move away from that, the more you start to pay. A telephoto lens of 100mm is more expensive but a similar-quality and brand and specs telephoto lens of 200mm is even more expensive and so forth. Similarly wide angle lenses. A 35mm equivalent focal length wide angle lens is least expensive and then the lenses get more expensive the wider you go, to 28mm, 24mm and so forth. So your iPhone 6 Plus was at 30mm equivalent focal length, how is the Lumia 1020? It is 26mm equivalent focal length. Quite a lot wider than the iPhone as you can see, compare the two pictures.

Now your son, who happens to be a big fan of Sony because of his Playstation addiction, has his brand new Xperia Z3 and comes there right next you, says, hey, Dad, thats an awesome view and pulls out his Z3 and snaps his picture. This is the picture his camera takes.

 

 

Picture by Tomi T Ahonen, you may use with attribution

So yes, the Sony Xperia Z3 has a wide angle lens with a focal length equivalent of 25mm. It is still wider and now he can actually add photographic style elements to his picture, adding more sky to the top than mom can with the Lumia. This lens is so wide you can’t really go much wider before the picture will get distorted. But you could go to 24mm. So in walks your daughter who is the family’s budding photojournalist, who uses the Galaxy K Zoom. And yes, you knew where this was going, the K Zoom has a 24mm-240mm equivalent focal length zoom lens. Of course she catches the widest image from the exact same window. Only the K Zoom gets this much crammed into that same photograph:






Picture by Tomi T Ahonen, you may use with attribution

So yes, look at the buildings to the right and you’ll spot the difference between the last two pictures. This is camera lens design choices. A wider angle lens is more expensive. It is also what most cameraphone users constantly crave - squeeze in, squeeze in - as they take their family pictures and group photos. The wider the better. The difference between the iPhone 6 Plus owner and the K Zoom owner is, that if its a crowded dining room, the iPhone user may have to leave Uncle Tomi totally out of the photo simply because the angle is not wide enough. And again before you start bickering, Apple is moving in the right direction, the focal length equivalent on the iPhone 4S was 33mm. And the other manufacturers are doing the same with cameraphones only they are further along, Nokia went from 35mm equivalent on the N93 to 28mm equivalent on the N86 to now the 26mm equivalent starting with the 808 Pureview (which is on the L1020). This is because that is how consumers use their cameraphones. So this round goes to the K Zoom. Sony Xperia takes honorable mention. Nokia comes in only third and Apple is behind on the curve (again), significantly behind the other three. And reason for Apple being so obstinate is cost and .. light. (Did you say light? Not weight but light as in sun, a lamp? That kind of light? Yes indeeed. But lets first do the picture-stiching).

BUT PANORAMA

So yeah the iLoyals will remind me that iPhone 6 Plus has Panorama that so smartly lets us take wide pictures and then automatically stitch them together. Fine. First, you and I know this, the normal user non-geek in the random sudden photography situation will never remember there is such an option, and often won’t ‘notice’ that there is ‘a problem’ and will just try to take the best single picture possible (or if smart/experienced, take several pictures of differing angles). But this is now again a work-around to a clear technical deficiency. And Panorama was once a clever idea, today it is on all premium cameraphones so its nothing for iPhone to beat the rivals. But panorama on a wider-angle original picture is even more powerful than on a narrower field camera. And then is it really the solution? Lets go to the pictures. This is what most normal people would think of doing, if they remembered they had panorama. Will this solve the front building problem of missing drama? No




Picture by Tomi T Ahonen, you may use with attribution

So yeah, you can do panorama and get a wider image but its not the same shape as on a wider angle lens. And this is not going to work on your lovely laptop screen saver, now you get those black edges on the top and bottom. And in this case of using Panorama in horizontal mode, it solves the wrong problem. I wanted more sky, I wanted more of the building in the front not more of the view to the sides. So then you could of course do panorama up-and-down way (that most ‘normal’ people will not even think is possible on a feature that is called ‘panorama’) which gives you this:

Picture by Tomi T Ahonen, you may use with attribution

Ok now the front building and sky are yes, nicely visible but where can I use this narrow tall ‘picture’? On an elevator maybe? This fits exactly no laptops or TV screens etc. Now we don't get any of the width to make this a normal-shaped image. Nice try but no cigar. This is a clumsy, partial solution that most users will not even think of when the need arises. Why not just give us a proper wide angle lens instead?

COMPARE IN ONE PHOTOGRAPH

So lets compare the 4 lenses in one picture. This again is a mock-up but superimposing the lines of how much less is visible when you go from 24mm to 25mm to 26mm to 30mm wide angle lenses at the exact same location in Capetown at Tabletop Mountain:




Picture by Tomi T Ahonen, you may use with attribution

And remember, because iPhone has the lowest resolution, any of the other cameras can always crop into the image, get the same picture as the iPhone can do at 30mm wide angle (and still have far higher resolution in that image than the iPhone's 8mp). But this picture is probably more useful as a 'tool' to compare the four phones than those individual pictures in the above series.

So onto forecasting. Will we see lenses even wider. Eventually yes but not soon by the three that are so close to (or at) 24mm equivalent. Apple should get a wider-angle update which might only be from 30mm to 28mm, slightly more but not all the way to 24mm. Apple doesn’t make big jumps, they do small iterations and lag in the specs. A little change they can handle, a big jump would mess up the very tight space for the lens assembly and trying to maintain f/2.2 aperture while making a 24mm lens would almost necessitate buying premium camera elements from someone who knows what they’re doing like a Carl Zeiss. Apple isn’t interested in that. They aren’t selling the best cameraphone, the cameras will only be ‘good enough’ not the ‘best’. Apple focuses on other areas instead.

MY APERTURE IS BIGGER THAN YOURS

So who needs an aperture in the cranial cavity then? (ie a hole in the head?). There is some method to the madness over at Apple. So they have been resisting very wide angle lenses. Is there any other gain than simply a few pennies saved out of this behavior? Yes. A camera lens is quite a complex set of compromises. One of the compromises relates to lens design extremes and the ability to pass light through it. Every camera lens imposes a tax on the light that passes through. The maximum possible light it allows depends on the largest opening in its aperture (some lenses have fixed apertures, these are always cheaper lenses). The ‘standard’ lenses of 50mm equivalent and near that, allow largest apertures. Apertures are measured by ‘F Stop’ (don’t ask). F/1.2 is in commercial lenses the perfection in aperture. The larger the number the smaller is the hole through which the light is passed in the lens design. So F/1.8 or F/2.4 or F/3.5 etc type of maximum apertures for the lens. And yes, you can fit a larger aperture on a 28mm equivalent lens than on a 24mm equivalent lens (and the same in telephoto lenses, the further past 85mm you go, the larger F/ stop number you get in other words the lens cannot get as large an aperture for light to go through).

So the rivals are moving away from a standard lens design to ‘more wide angle’ and that means its ever more difficult to design a lens with a large aperture, ie from 35mm to 28mm to 24mm. One need we consumers have of our pocketable cameraphones is the widest possible angle yes, but a conflicting interests is 'maximum light'. We often shoot the pictures indoors and at times in very poor lighting at dimly-lit restaurants, clubs, bars, pubs, discos etc. Apple is optimizing more the large aperture than the wide angle. Lets measure.

How are the biggest apertures of these lenses on these cameraphones? The smaller number the better. Apple manages a F/2.2. That was improved from the iPhone 4S that only did F/2.4. Its significantly ‘easier’ to do F/2.2 on the 30mm equivalent lens focal length design than it is at the 25mm end where Sony Xperia Z3 is. So yes, while we hate the iPhone lens for not being wide enough, at least it does allow Apple to build in a large aperture (and in terms of penalties of a fatter iPhone overall casing, this should not impact it). Apple hits aperture size of F/2.2. That is a very good result for a smartphone.

How are the rivals? Nokia’s Lumia 1020 has an aperture of also F/2.2 (and its an upgrade from F/2.4 in the 808 Pureview). The Samsung Galaxy K Zoom suffers from a very complex lens design. Zoom lenses always perform poorly on aperture. The K Zoom only does F/3.1. And how about our Z3 darling? Sony shines with the Xperia and wins this contest at F/2.0 with the biggest aperture. But Apple did not finish last, in fact the iPhone 6 Plus came in tied for silver with the Lumia. Galaxy K Zoom came last on aperture.

TELEGRAPH TELEPHONE TELEPHOTO

What about telephoto capability? Yes, these were cameraphones that are usually used to shoot family group photos and selfies. But if you do see that spotted owl or bald head eagle and wanted to snap a picture of it? Or you can see Lewis Hamilton sitting at the terrace too far to go take a picture from near him, but you’d still like to grab a picture of the reigning Formula 1 Champion. These cameras on smartphones are not usually used to take pictures from afar, but we often do try to do so, and would like to have that ability. Consumers notice they have digital zoom on their phones and think that will do it, but it won’t. Digital zoom is just magnifying the pixels and won’t get you any closer to the real action. The iPhone 6 Plus can’t help us here. Neither can the Sony Xperia Z3. What is needed is ‘real zoom’. That is called ‘optical zoom’ like on all videocameras and most premium point-and-shoot cameras and available (at higher costs) to all DSLR cameras.

And for a mobile phone? Its actually not such an absurd idea. The world’s first true optical zoom cameraphone was released in 2006, yes, before the iPhone. The incredible Nokia N93 (the ‘contortionist’ phone) was that masterpiece. At the time it was Nokia’s first smartphone with a 3mp camera but added 3x optical zoom (well, not quite, it was actually measured only at 2.7x zoom but who’s counting). The focal length equivalent was 35mm to 95mm. So the same cameraphone could be used as a 35mm wide angle lens or just pressing the zoom button, all the way to 95mm telephoto ability. Without any digital shenanigans. Honest real optical zoom. It was a breathtaking device back in 2006. That was the phone that decided it for me to abandon my old Canon SLR film-based gear, and go fully digital and only on cameraphones. That smartphone alone was by no means enough to replace my existing gear at the time, I don’t mean that, but I could see that the evolution from that starting point would deliver ever better cameras on phones, that I would of course be buying.

So who cares about an 9 year old step in the evolution of cameraphones? There is a very big relevant point, hold on. So next up was the iPhone right in January of 2007 and suddenly the amazing N93 contortionist phone was instantly obsoleted. Not because the iPhone could hope to match the optical zoom of that camera, and the video and flash at the time. No, it was because the iPhone was so incredinly thin (for phones at the time) and with its large touch-screen, it made the N93 look like a phone from the stone ages. Nokia wanted to continue with super cameraphones and after that, the world’s first true zoom in a phone, they wanted to go further. The obvious next step in Nokia camera evolution was to put a 5mp sensor into that design with the 3x optical zoom. Except that the phone physical form factor was so fat, thick, nasty, that Nokia management decided that form factor was ended. They even announced it to be gone, so nobody had any second thoughts about it.

What Nokia then said internally to the cameraphone team who had just made the N93, that they could have ‘real zoom’ in a Nokia phone if they could do it without the optical penalty. Talk about a ‘moon shot’ project. Talk about ‘mission: impossible’. The laws and physics of photography said this was not possible. So the Nokia engineers went outside the box. Then they spent 5 years developing what became the 808 Pureview.

The reason the 808 Pureview and Lumia 1020 have that gargantuan sensor of 41mp is not to capture the most detail of any camera made. That was a bonus outcome from their concept. They wanted to produce a 5mp camera, that had 3x optical zoom, without the optical. So to keep the phone design semi-flat, they decided to make a massively oversize sensor, something so big nobody else had even conceived of one. And the cost of that huge sensor would be offset by the fact that now the housing of the phone was minimized, there was no moving zoom element in the lens that needed a motor and drained battery, etc. Yes, still expensive but technically it was possible. Because as we know, you can take an existing picture, and crop into it, and as long as you’re happy that the ending picture has less pixels than you started with, that is ‘zooming without optical lens’. Yes, its zooming with megapixels but out of such a huge starting point, that at 5mp resolution, you do get 3x zoom from 41mp and end up at a 5mp picture. For a design out of 2007 (when the iPhone had 2mp camera) a 5mp cameraphone with ‘loss-less zoom’ was a very big achievement.

And when you do the math (and trust me, I’ve done it) the specs of the 808 Pureview (and thus also Lumia 1020) hit the ‘exact’ performance of the N93 but upgrading from 3mp to 5mp. Yes, at 5mp resolution, you get to zoom not quite 3x but 2.7 times. Exactly like the N93 did 2.7x zoom out of 3mp sensor. Now, the 808 PV also went wider than the N93 so that 35mm equivalent zoom focal lenth at 5mp picture size is from 28mm to 77mm mild telephoto length. If you had an N93 and felt you got now robbed, because the older phone went longer telephoto in the zooming, not to worry. At 3mp resolution the 808 Pureview does zoom to 100mm (for 3.6x zoom rating). An astonishing achievement while not needing heavy lens elements of optical glass. Unfortunately by the time they finally got the 808 Pureview to the market, the sensor race had moved to 12mp and 16mp sensors, so now the effective zoom ability in the Pureview was no longer that impressive, and the argument became again about pixels.

But against your iPhone 6 Plus with its 8mp sensor, if you stand at the exact same spot at the big sports arena - say you are halfway up the seats - if you take a picture with your iPhone you get mostly the audience filling your picture and the field of sports play (football, basketball, ice hockey, tennis whatever) is a small piece in the middle of your phone. Now, what about your pal who has a Lumia 1020 (or 808 Pureview). They can take a picture with and zoom in it to 8mp. So by picture resolution, it is still an 8mp picture just like yours, but at 2x magnification. 2x zoom. Real zoom (real may be stretching it) or definitely zooming without loss of detail (at that target resolution). The Lumia 1020 can zoom more depending on what is the end image size. It does 8mp zoom at 2x, 5mp zoom at almost 3x and 3mp zoom at nearly 4x.

You can call it a gimmick if you want, but its a clever and valid technical solution to a difficult problem of how to do real zoom without optical manipulation. How does this compare to your picture? Its like your pal walked all the way to the front row, and took his picture that close with the iPhone! Half way to the game. Your picture of 8mp shot with the iPhone 6 Plus gets you lots of pictures of heads of people in the audience. Your friend standing right next to you, with his Lumia 1020, gets a picture of 8mp that is as if taken as close as from the first row of the seats. Is this fair? What kind of magician-phone is that? Its pretty darn clever thats what it is. But it also means, that yes, they put in a 41 megapixel sensor when pro cameras were at about 20mp.

IS THAT A BINOCULARS IN YOUR POCKET OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO SEE ME

So that was Nokia’s entry, and very novel way to achieve modest zooming capability without a massive lens construction to clutter your pocket. If you start off with that 38mp picture (or 34mp) then yes, you sacrifice the huge pixel count detail picture when you do the ‘Pureview Zoom’ but yes, at 8mp you can do 2x zoom. If you are satisfied to have a camera image only of 5mp, you can do 3x zoom. And best of all, you don’t have to decide on the spot. What I do with my 808 Pureview is I always shoot full mode, and do the zooming later, after the fact.

So yes, we know already the winner of this category is gonna be the Galaxy K Zoom. The only real optical zoom in a cameraphone. And to start with, here is where many buyers have in the past broken with the cameraphones, if they need real zooming (and/or telephoto ability) then its a clear choice, a cameraphone is a toy, a real camera has optical zoom and now its time to walk to the camera store. The single biggest reason for anyone buying a stand-alone or DSLR camera today, above what they would have in a top-line smartphone, is zooming/telephoto ability that most top cameraphones simply don’t deliver. And 10x optical zoom (and add to that 20mp sensor resolution) will be impossible to describe accurately. So let me illustrate for you.

This is my hotel room, shot with an 8mp resolution cameraphone. No, its not the iPhone 6 Plus so don’t look at the quality of the color or image. Just look at the room.




Now if I showed you variations of the room shot at different image resolutions, they would not look any better because of the limitations of the PC screen you and I are using on our laptops. But we can see the quality difference if we do some serious magnification. And I do mean 'serious'. Can you see that watch on the table just to the right of the flat-screen TV? The watch with a yellow dial? Lets magnify to see only the face of that watch. Lets start by using the iPhone 6 Plus (equivalent resolution) at 8mp. 





The pixels are very clearly visible. We can tell the time but can't really see the detail of the smaller dials nor the brand of the watch. Now lets take a picture from exactly the same spot with the 41mp sensor like on the Lumia 1020, and magnify the watch to the same size as above. It looks like this:




The pixels are barely noticable, the detail is far greater, we can now see the Ferrari branding of the watch and a lot of the detail in the three smaller dials for example. Then lets take the Galaxy K Zoom and use 10x optical zoom and 20mp from the same spot. The image looks like this:




Hahahahahahahaaaaa....  Yes. From the same spot. If we are back at that sporting game and I stand next to you and your friend who had the Lumia. If I take out my K Zoom and take a picture - from half-way up the stands - the picture will not be as if I was taking it from the front row. No. I get 20mp pictures - sharper than your 8mp and I get ‘closer’ so much, that I am not only on the playing field, I am close enough that the athlete doesn’t FIT fully into the frame! If I use extreme zoom range I get a picture where that athlete is visible in my picture only from the waist-up !!!! And at 20mp crystal-clear clarity (haha, assuming my hands aren’t shaking too much to mess up the long-distance photo).

Let me show you what I mean. Lets imagine that someone (not me) is a creepy Peeping Tom who likes to spy on girls at the pool. So I happen to be, no, THAT person happens to be at a hotel with a balcony or nice view from the window like this:




Yes across the street a few buildings over, there is a nice hotel with a rooftop pool in that house in the front. And its quite far away, but I can kind of see some people possibly there. So lets take the iPhone at its 8mp image and then lets see if we can see any sexy girls by the pool.




Ok, yeah, there might be something there but this is not a ‘picture’. This is a blur at this range. We can't really tell even if that is a woman or a man. And the 20mp of the Xperia won't really help better than the 8mp on the iPhone. What about the clever zoom on the Lumia then? It is better, definitely, see this:




Wow that IS far better and yes, clearly there is a girl by the pool. Now is there a second person at the chair next to her. While its still too pixelated for us to really use this picture, note how much detail it captures than 8mp, look for example at the floor. The 8mp shows a flat brown floor. This 41mp sensor detects that the floor is made of wood, we can clearly see the planks and could count how many planks there are on that pool floor haha. And beyond this level of detail, I have now pushed the Lumia modest zoom to its limit. Now lets pull out James Bonds’ spyphone. K Zoom do your magic. Running the Zoom to max 10x magnification the 240mm equivalent focal length, and then using the 20mp to its best, I get this image. Who’s your daddy?

 

Yeah! So its not just one girl, its two. In very sharp detail (at this distance!) If either turned to face even partially this way, they could be identifed clearly - at this DISTANCE. With a CAMERAPHONE. I estimated from a map and the height differential that the distance is about 130 meters from where my balcony was at the hotel and this neighboring building's roof swimming pool. So thats about 400 feet for you American readers. (And yes, I had to wait until I spotted the picture where both girls were facing away from me. They would be easiy identifyable if their faces were seen at this resolution haha. And no, they were not any celebs, just that I of course don't want to post identifyable pictures of anyone without their permission)

Look at the detail on the table between the girls, or for example the swimming pool tiles in top left of picture - that type of detail is all lost even on the Lumia sensor. This is what I mean, if we are in the basketball game, your iPhone 6 Plus will get a picture of the backs of the heads of 1200 fans. From the same spot, I can isolate the star player so close that he’s cut from waist-up and see his expression clearly. This is POWER in your pocket. This is magic. The K Zoom is the first phone that has effectively a binoculars function built in. An ASTONISHING feature for a smartPHONE.

THE MOON SHOT

So? The further the object is that we try to photograph the more obvious is the telephoto capacity. Did you ever try to take pictures of the moon with your cameraphone? Haha yeah, I tried it too. On all of my past cameraphones. But that darn thing is just too far. So what if you have 240mm equivalent telephoto lens (and 20mp sensor). If you put that Galaxy K Zoom on a really steady platform (ie tripod), have the manual settings correct for the exposure (aperture and shutter speed), and use the 10 second self-timer to ensure there is no shake. Then this is was the raw image from my hotel view tonight:



(So obviously I have shrunk the pixel count form 20mp to 1mp to fit the blog, i just wanted to show what kind of maximum moon-size framing we can do at 10x magnification. You'll never capture a moon this enormous onto your iPhone picture haha). So now, lets see if we can enlarge that to see any real 'moon' detail shall we? Check this out...




YES. Those ARE craters very small yes, but we CAN see detail ON THE MOON. With a CAMERAPHONE.


So what is the factor? Yes, the Galaxy K Zoom goes from 24mm to 240mm equivalent focal length measurement, so it is genuinely 10x optical zoom. From reading the blog you now know we have some issues to consider if we compare the 4 cameraphones across. Obviously the K Zoom is gonna run away with this ability but the 'advantage' is not the same against the rivals. The sensor pixel count is a factor in the final picture as is the actual focal length of the rival camera(phone). So yes, if you have another - any brand, any design - camera that has a 20mp sensor and a 24mm equivalent focal length wide-angle lens, then the resulting image at K Zoom's maximum telephoto zoom setting is 10x magnification. Now, lets keep the megapixels the same (20mp) but lets change the actual lens optical length, to illustrate. How much closer can I get with the K Zoom compared to the Sony Xperia Z3? Its focal length is 25mm not 24mm. What does that mean, it means the K Zoom is not 10x magnification, it is only 9.6x. Ah-ha! You see what I mean. Now lets take the Lumia 1020. That has further slightly larger focal length of 26mm equivalent at its starting point but also has the 41mp sensor. So the Lumia can fight back a bit. How much closer can the K Zoom get than a picture shot at the same spot, using the Lumia? Only about 7x magnification, not 10x. And what of the iPhone 6 Plus with the 30mm focal length equivalent starting point, but now the pixel count is only 8mp. Here the opposite effect happens and the effective magnification becomes more than 10x. Now the picture shot with maximum telephoto zoom setting of Galaxy K Zoom is about 13x magnified compared to the same picture shot with the iPhone 6 Plus. 

Pro tip: if you own a zoom lens on any camera, cameraphone or videocam then here is a good pro tip. Learn how the widest angle zoom and longest telephoto zoom positions relate to your body. Push out your hand then measure your fingers/hands to see the exact width of the extremes of your zoom. So for me, with the K Zoom now, I know if I hold my hands wide (thumb and pinkie finger widest spread apart), three such hands next to each other is the 24mm angle (or two hands thus on top of each other is the 24mm heght for my hands). And the extreme telephoto zoom setting. If I hold my hand flat, all fingers touching each other, then 240mm setting is the width from the thumb to the pinkie finger. This way I can instantly see without taking the camera out and aiming at a target, is the resulting picture 'of the right size' that it 'fits' inside the picture that my camera zoom lens can handle. So learn your body, push your hands as far out as they go, and learn the measures. It will make photography more fun when you know when the lens(es) fit the picture and when they don't...

So lets do the grading on zoom ability for the four rivals. Yes, the Lumia did a bold ‘out of the box’ solution for zoom and deserves credit for it. But there is nothing like the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom on the market today. The only rival this cameraphone has ever had on telephoto and zoom ability, was its predecessaor the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom (a somewhat incomplete first iteration on this concept from 2013).

This is a technological slam dunk! This is a home run. The moment any camera fan starts to play with the K Zoom they are forever hooked. THIS is how pocket phone-cameras were supposed to be. Thank you Samsung for the K Zoom. The telephoto ability winner by knockout. Lumia comes in at still a nice silver place in a category nobody else has bothered ever even to try (there is supposed to be a third optical zoom entrant, from Asus, later this year, so lets see). And both Sony and Apple are in tied last place, no points for not qualifying.

MACRO ME CLOSE, OH MACRO ME

Wanna get close to the subject. I mean real close-up. Collect butterflies or insects or postage stamps or coins or figurines? And ever tried to photograph those with your Xperia? Ain’t happenin, dude. Its lens is too simple, it doesn’t have ‘macro’ ability to take close-up pictures. But this feature is becoming common at the top end. The Lumia has macro as does the iPhone as does the K Zoom. And would you even notice? Well, when we not only have macro on the phone but also a 41mp sensor, check this out.




Thats the EU version. For our Yankee cousins who are metrically-challenged, here is the inches version:




Try doing that on your Xperia. This is what Steve Litchfield coined the term ‘megapixel microscopy’ is. Using a cameraphone’s pixel count and a close-up function to enable a kind of poor man’s microscope. See very small objects in large, sharp detail. And yeah, almost all premium cameras with built-in lenses have macro functionality and all major camera lens makers offer series of macro lenses or macro ability in some of their lenses. A real honest need for many (but by no means most) camera users. One that Sony is unable to address but all three rivals, Nokia, Apple and Samsung do quite happily. PS Thanks to reader wolf 6 for correction where an earlier version of this issue had an error on the iPhone. wolf 6 even provided handy pictures to compare (see comments).

So macro ability is a deficiency Sony should fix without much of a thickness penalty to the slim Xperia phones that several other upgrade options would add.

THE MEGABYTES OF MEGAPIXELS

 

So then you took your pictures. Will your camera store them. All of these do, obviously to very large storage ability. But all rivals are not equal here. Do you offer removable storage media to expand picture (and especially HD video) storage? No, don’t tell me ‘cloud’. I want to store my pictures privately, to share them with friends even without network coverage and move them rapidly to my PC ie by inserting the microSD card rather than clumsy file transfers or slow USB cables etc. And where’s your precious cloud when I’m travelling in Kenya and Nigeria and Ecuador and Bolivia and Nepal, eh? In some cities and expensive hotels, sure, but I want to exchange my pictures NOW with the friend who also has a nice smartphone. Who offers removable storage. Sony yes. Lumia yes. Samsung yes. Apple. No.

Apple wants to screw you by not conforming to industry standards. They simply refuse to join all other smartphone makers who offer microSD storage media. But not Apple. Apple who introduced the world to the 3.5 inch ‘hard’ floppy disk (the one that the ‘save’ icon is based on. Previous floppy disks were 5.25 inches in size and literally were floppy ie bendable material). But no. Ok Apple but then you suffer another fourth-place when all rivals get a tie for gold for this ability. ALL stand-alone digital cameras have removable media storage. ALL. All videocams have removable storage. ALL. All rival smartphones have removable storage. ALL. But Apple says ‘screw you’ to removable storage, because ..iNonsense follows.

WANNA SWIM

So Sony’s party piece. Wanna take the phone to the shower or bathtub? That was what the modest waterproofing on the Xperia Z3 was meant for, not for diving or long swims. But it will allow brief visits to the pool (I don’t imagine taking many pictures from under the water in the shower or bathtub haha). Yeah, its the only cameraphone of this group which can be taken to the pool and to shoot pictures (and video) from under water. I did it with my Xperia Z1 so I know it works.

Now is this a gimmick yes obviously it is (when considering it as a cameraphone, the main intention is for us to bring our entertainment to the shower and bath). And yes, Sony wins this and the other three do not even place, tied for the category of disqualified. But is this a biggie no, not really. Nice yes for Sony and yes we’d like all electronic gadgets to be waterproof at some point but not huge points for this. Not like say Xenon flash and optical zoom haha.

So forecasting time. This is something Apple will find relatively easy to do because it already is refusing removable batteries and microSD card slots. I am not expecting the 2015 iPhone range to become waterproof but it may be something Apple might do around 2016 or so. There may well be plenty waterproof Lumias but likely not at the pureview camera end, so Microsoft would rather do it at other devices. Sammy already sells waterproof variants of Galaxy and K Zoom would be ridiculously complex to try to waterproof so no, the K Zoom want be getting its own cloack of dryness.

DEPTH OF FIELD

Depth of what? Yes, depth of field. You know if you take a picture at the birthday of your 5-year old nephew blowing the candles on the cake? And you focus on the candle. And then the child is slightly out of focus. Or your camera focused on the child and the candle is slightly out of focus (but not the whole picture, the nephew is perfectly sharp). This is depth-of-field and its not an accident. It is a photographic phenomenon that can be controlled. The control of depth of field comes from the aperture. You need an adjustable aperture (like all good cameras have and no cheap cameraphones have). This is a somewhat ‘basic’ camera tech ability that those hobbyists interested in photography learn about early but one that pure amateurs almost never understand or bother with. Oh, one frustrating example - taking a picture of the wonderful view from the airplane, and the phone focused on the raindrops on the window instead and the rest of the picture is unfocused blur haha... Sharp raindrops on the glass though...

This is not an unheard-of quality in a cameraphone either. The world’s first cameraphone with aperture control was the Nokia N82 in 2009. But then along the way Nokia dropped this feature as it was not very much demanded by the average cameraphone users. But it is a technical ability that proper ‘real’ cameras all have from mid-price point-and-shoot cameras and all DSLR cameras. And one current cameraphone does aperture control. Its not the iPhone 6 Plus. Its not the Xperia Z3. Its the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom. Another mark of a proper attempt of a ‘real’ complete camera that ticks all the boxes, not a severe compromise bordering on a toy. The K Zoom is the real thing. It is the only cameraphone of this bunch that allows depth-of-field control ie an adjustable aperture.

Forecasting time - we may well see a Lumia (or perhaps ‘Nokia classic’ next year) that has a novel way to do aperture control. Nokia has some recent patent in this space. Might be a similar radical ‘out of the box’ solution like Pureview was to zoom. But don’t expect this kind of ‘camera nerdy’ tech onto an iPhone or Xperia.

Several features that recently came to the iPhone and seem still amazing like Panorama, Geotagging, Autofocus etc are actually standard features also the rivals here, so no points there but one recent technical solution has to be mentioned, that the Apple iPhone 6 Plus brags about and is very real

OPTICAL IMAGE STABILIZATION

This is an expensive and valuable aid for essentially every photographer who doesn’t exclusively use a tripod for all pictures haha.. There have been digital image stabilization systems for a long while which are pretty weak but optical image stabilization is the real thing. And as this is founded on the motion sensors, it even works in the dark. It won’t make perfectly stable pictures all the time but it helps even very competent photographers achieve sharper images because we as humans cause movement in the camera when we take the pictures, from camera shake (and we may even not be on a totally stable shooting platform, such as a moving vehicle, etc). This is one of the few big reasons why the iPhone 6 Plus is ‘Plus’ on the camera side vs iPhone 6 basic model that doesn’t offer optical image stabilization. And yes, its for all users and its very useful. And it helps improve iPhone 6 Plus photographs significantly over all previous iPhone pictures.

So yeah, cudos for Apple for this big improvement. Now is it unique? The Sony Xperia Z3 doesn’t have optical image stabilization. The Lumia 1020 however, does have it. And the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom... also has optical image stabilization. So here we split three golds and one no-show.

Forecasting, Sony should add this to Xperia Z4 or soon thereafter. It will soon be a glaring deficiency.

MOTOR DRIVE

And do you want rapid-fire photographs? Like the pro camera users do with their ‘motor drives’ on their cameras that go click-click-click-click and take rapid-fire pictures, so that you can for example get a series of pictures about some fast action? Yeah. Its on some smartphones too, its called Continous Shooting mode. The iPhone has that as does the K Zoom and Xperia but Nokia’s Lumia 1020 doesn’t do continuous shooting mode. Here a rare last-place finish for Nokia with the three rivals sharing a gold.

This should be on the next iteration of the Pureview Lumia top cameraphone.

SPOT METERING

So how do automatic cameraphones determine how much light there is coming into the picture, and then adjust their picture settings to get a good image? The focus point for auto-focus is also the measurement point for the light (this is good to know, sometimes you get a particularly dark or light picture, by shifting the aiming point then to a darker target (gets lighter image) than the center/default, or lighter target (gets darker end picture) can be a useful little trick. But yeah. Professional photographers often even carry separate hand-held light meters to get the lighting measurements exactly as they wanted. Is there any way to use the existing light meter in the phone, to point to a separate spot than the focus point? Yes. This is called spot metering and its also not exclusive to premium stand-alone phones. There are a couple of cameraphones currently in the market who offer this ‘pro camera’ type of feature. You guessed already which two offer that. Nokia Lumia 1020 and Galaxy K Zoom have separated spot metering option. Xperia Z3 and iPhone 6 Plus don’t let users make such measurements to improve their photography.

MAKE IT SIMPLE

So yeah, many of the features I talk about here are issues only shutterbugs and cameranerds even know about or care. Macro settings, spot metering, depth of field. What was that aperture thing and why did anyone care about a mechanical shutter again? Yes. Apple is the master at making things easy and simple and automated. The iPhone 6 Plus is one of the easiest cameraphones ever made, with which you can take great pictures. Not good pictures, great pictures. Inspite of all the shortcomings I listed here, the iPhone 6 Plus will produce great, award-winning pictures. It is definitely more than good enough for that. It is most definitely easy. And its clearly the best cameraphone Apple has ever manufactured. But is it the best cameraphone? Not even close. The best cameraphone, in fact the global winner of cameraphone of the year for ten years running has always been the top Nokia cameraphone including such huge milestones as the N93, the N86, the N8 and the 808 Pureview. The N8 was so far above the field that it won cameraphone of the year two years in a row - when it was no longer Nokia’s flagship but the camera part was that good (oh, and Elop had screwed up all of Nokia R&D so the next phones were delayed in the Windows transition mess).

The current reigning champ (ie of phones released in 2013) is by near unanimous choice the Lumia 1020 winning the awards for best cameraphone of 2013. Nokia faced its first serious contender in a long while that year, when Samsung brought the Galaxy S4 Zoom to the table. That was still a technical knock-out win for Nokia but Sammy went back and did a thorough update for the Galaxy K Zoom and judging by the reviews of camera magazines and enthusiasts and experts, the Galaxy is now the front-runner for the first non-Nokia cameraphone-of-year winner in ages, for 2014. Lets see how the various awards come out.

Yes I have one and love it. And no, even for all its glory, the Galaxy K Zoom is still not ticking all the boxes that a premium stand-alone camera has, so for example still missing are tripod mount, flashgun hot shoe mount, viewfinder, but thats close to it. This is the nearest thing we’ve ever had to a total stand-alone camera merging with smartphone. The Lumia 1020 was the previous champ, but now the K Zoom adds aspects that Lumia doesn’t do or match, such as wide angle to 24mm, zooming all the way to 10x while retaining the full 20mp resolution. aperture control, continuous shooting. On some aspects they somewhat split the honors like on the lens construction, Sammy has more elements, Nokia has a bigger aperture; Samsung is all glass but Nokia’s was made by Carl Zeiss. You could argue here either way which was the better lens construction.

And Nokia still wins handily the sensor race from size to light sensitivity to pixel count. So its not all K Zoom’s way. But the optical zoom (also very powerful advantage in shooting video) is a huge advantage. From wider angle to far longer telephoto range. 10 times optical zoom without loss of 20mp resolution vs Nokia who go down in resolution the further you Zoom.

But to remind those who wished their iBling could finally win in this category, no dice. Let me summarize. On no category is the iPhone ahead of all 3 rivals. The only times the iPhone was rated best, was a tied gold. Each of the rivals had a total honest solo gold several times in this contest. And the Sony places third, the Nokia second. So briefly iPhone vs K Zoom. Bigger sensor. More powerful sensor (ISO count). More detail (megapixels) in sensor. A mechanical shutter. Xenon flash. A nine element lens. A lens out of glass. A lens made by a known established camera maker (Samsung) vs a low-cost camera elements plastics provider, Largan Precision. A wider angle in wide angle (24mm vs 30mm). And telephoto zooming all the way to 10x. Macro close ups, microSD storage and spot metering. In only one aspect did the iPhone 6 Plus outperform the Galaxy K Zoom and that is in maximum lens aperture at F/2.2 vs F/3.1 but even here iPhone wasn’t the best of class (which was Sony). Between these two there is no contest. There is no contest. The iPhone 6 Plus may be many things, read minds, do your homework and do time travel but its not the best cameraphone of 2014. The K Zoom has a legitimate claim to be that. As a smartphone it may be ugly and only mid-class not tops, but as a camera it is unmatched on any phone. It is clearly the best cameraphone currently in the world (that Samsung inexplicably isn’t marketing in all countries such as the USA...)

I WILL DO AN AMAZING PART 2

When I was editing this blog story high in the cool air onboard a Boeing 777 on yet another long haul British Airways flight, sipping on a smooth Glenlivet 15yo single malt whisky in comfy business class, I stumbled upon a thought. Ah yes, even we old fogies do get them. I may have thought of something amazing. Lets say i Dream of an iDream. I initially wrote it into this blog article, but it was 7,000 words more and totally tilted the story into another direction, so luckily for you reading this now, I decided, no, that should be its own blog story. So with that teaser and cliff-hanger. Tomorrow part 2: I dream of iDream.

UPDATE: now that blog is up: I Dream the iDream.

EPILOGUE TO FOLLOW AFTER THE FOLD

The above blog story was very long as it is, even by my long-winded writing style, at 18,000 words. But this blog article has been a long time coming, and researching it brought back vividly all sorts of memories. So in the extended ‘epilogue’ part to this blog article, and another 7,000 words, I will share some of my personal memories with cameras after the fold, there is nothing more to the cameraphone industry analysis part which ends here. Those of my friends who are interested in personal stories relating to one of my all time fave gadget the camera, do follow me on a trip down cameralane.

..... (divide) .....

Are More Deaths Looming in Smartphone Bloodbath? Sony & Blackberry might be sold soon

Originally I wrote this about Sony (hence the long analysis) and before I posted it, I learned about Blackberry. So we have TWO potential deaths in the Bloodbath now pending. Lets do quick analysis of both. First up

SONY LOOKING FOR BUYERS OF ITS XPERIA UNIT

Reuters has an interesting story that Sony is fed up with its losses in the Xperia smartphone business (and in the TV business too) and considering selling the unit or units. They don't have an offer yet but this is apparently an open call for anyone who might like to bid. And yes, it would be yet another classic huge handset maker that would end up dead in the Bloodbath of the smartphone Wars that I've been chronicing o this blog since 2010. Would be a shame. But lets do a bit of thinking of why and perhaps what might it be worth and who might be interested in buying.

So first, obviously, corporate management should be run with science and facts, not emotion and wishful thinking. The SonyEricsson handset business partnership was rarely able to report profits in its ten year existence and since Sony bought Ericsson out of the partnership, its not been a consistent profit engine for Sony either. After a brief climb all the way to 3rd largest smartphone maker and briefly strong profits, last year Sony's Xperia unit went back into losses and some massive ones at that. Sony has cut its sales forecast from 50 million units per year (its fiscal year ends in March) to 43 million and again, to 41 million. Its market share is currently slightly below 3% and Sony is barely hanging onto a Top 10 slot among the world's largest smartphone makers. It has, however, differing from say Samsung and (Nokia)-Microsoft, already completed its transition from dumbphones to smartphones, so Sony is now 100% smartphones. At least that costly transition is over.

THIS IS THE PART I DON'T GET

So yeah. Sony Xperia. This is the part I really don't get. WHY is this business not profitable? There were no 'antennagate' disasters in production. The phones are very well received, extremely advanced designs at the cutting and often bleeding edge. If you look at the iPhone 6 series, those upgrades to the iPhone were all done by Sony years earlier to the Xperia line. Its a super premium brand across all its products from TVs to videogaming consoles to phones. What is wrong with this picture? If Apple with its iPhone, makes the most enormous profits ever seen in the handset industry, and the Sony Xperia line is just about the nearest thing to an iPhone that runs on Android not just on specs but also best in style, best in brand, best in quality, best in 'bling' (compared to anything from HTC or Blackberry or LG or Lumia Samsung's Galaxy etc) - and iPhone is superbly profitable, why is Xperia not 'also profitable'. I recognize Apple sells now 4X more iPhones but still, I can get it that a Huawei or ZTE or TCL is not as sexy or trusted brand as Apple but Sony! Why if the iPhone is the most profitable handset in history, and the Sony Xperia is the nearest thing to an iPhone on every measure, then why is Xperia not also profitable. It should be 'very' profitable if the iPhone is ridiculously profitable, as it is now.

THE iPHONE 6 HAS NEARLY CAUGHT UP TO XPERIA

So lets dig just a bit deeper on this. I am dead-serious. Look at what Apple now did with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Awesome updates, especially the bigger screens. So lets compare side by side:

SPEC . . . . . . . iPHONE 6 . . . . . . . XPERIA Z
Screen . . . . . . . 4.7 inch . . . . . . . . 5 inch
Resolution . . . . 750 x 1335 . . . . . . 1080 x 1950
Main camera . . 8mp . . . . . . . . . . . 13mp
Selfiecam . . . . 1.2mp . . . . . . . . . . 2.2mp
WiFi/GPS/4G . . yes . . . . . . . . . . . yes
NFC/BT . . . . . . yes . . . . . . . . . . . yes
FM radio . . . . . no . . . . . . . . . . . . yes
Java . . . . . . . . no . . . . . . . . . . . . yes
Memory . . . . . 16GB . . . . . . . . . . 16GB
MicroSD . . . . . no . . . . . . . . . . . . 64GB
Waterproof . . . no . . . . . . . . . . . . yes
Fingerprint . . . yes . . . . . . . . . . . no
Price . . . . . . . 700 dollars . . . . . . 600 dollars
Released . . . . Sept 2014 . . . . . . Jan 2013

Come on! Its not even close. The Sony Xperia Z matches or beats the iPhone 6 on all specs except fingerprint scanner, and has tons the iPhone doesn't such as microSD, Java support, FM radio and its waterproof. Come on. Look at the specs, down the line, Xperia is better on just about everything from bigger screen to better screen resolution to better cameras front and back... (PS these phones are nearly identical in size also, one millimeter in difference in height for example)

Then look at the LAUNCH DATE. This is not the current Z. This is not the previous Xperia Z. This is not the one before that. This is the original Z from 18 MONTHS before the new iPhone 6 came out. Sony can very legitimately say that Apple tried to match their old phone, and only came close. Then show the current Z3 and how much more Sony offers today than these '2013 specs' that the iPhone 6 is peddling. And finally the price! Even 18 monts before, the Sony was significantly cheaper than the new iPhone of today. But how about the top dog then? The iPhone 6 Plus with that massive screen? Sure, lets 

SPEC . . . . . . . iPHONE 6 Plus . . . XPERIA Z ULTRA
Screen . . . . . . . 5.5 inch . . . . . . . . 6.4 inch
Resolution . . . . 1080 x 1920 . . . . . 1080 x 1920
Main camera . . 8mp . . . . . . . . . . . 8mp
Selfiecam . . . . 1.2mp . . . . . . . . . . 2.2mp
WiFi/GPS/4G . . yes . . . . . . . . . . . yes
NFC/BT . . . . . . yes . . . . . . . . . . . yes
FM radio . . . . . no . . . . . . . . . . . . yes
Java . . . . . . . . no . . . . . . . . . . . . yes
Memory . . . . . 16GB . . . . . . . . . . 16GB
MicroSD . . . . . no . . . . . . . . . . . . 64GB
Waterproof . . . no . . . . . . . . . . . . yes
Fingerprint . . . yes . . . . . . . . . . . no
Price . . . . . . . 750 dollars . . . . . . 550 dollars
Released . . . . Sept 2014 . . . . . . Jun 2013

Seriously! Seriously folks. This is ridiculous. Again, you gan get the smartphone from Sony brand, that has an even bigger screen than the King Kong iPhone 6 Plus, that matches or beats every spec except it doesn't have fingerprint sensor. A much larger screen (one could say gargantuan) plus better front camera, FM radio, support of Java, a microSD card slot and its waterproof. And its FAR cheaper than the iPhone and it was released 15 months earlier. 

And if you don't want something quite that big, there is still the mid-range product from Sony the current Xperia Z3 has a 5.2 inch screen but blows most specs out of the field such as a 20mp main camera and 5mp selfiecam and still costs far less than the iPhone 6 Plus. (oh, random American readers - the prices we talk about here are the real prices you actually pay ie the so-called 'unsubsidised price' so yeah, your iPhone 6 did not cost you 199 dollars you actually are now paying the missing 501 dollars more via your 24 month contract with your carrier - plus they charge you interest. So you're paying more than most of the people around the world who only pay the 700 dollar cost upfront without hidden monthly payment plans and bogus interest on a device we call can afford to buy straight up. A smartphone is not a car or house we would need to put on a payments plan)

So. TWO YEARS AGO Sony engineers had completed designs that far far exceeded the latest iPhone 5 products and were so far ahead of Apple, that when Apple did - fully knowing what is out there from Sony - when Apple made its upgrades to its 6 Series, those iPhone 6 models still fell short of the Sony Xperias that were sold two years ago. How much does this underline the brilliance of Sony engineering? This is amazing tech.

SO WHAT WAS WRONG WITH SONY

The product is not bad. There were no manufacturing defects or costly recalls or sales boycotts. Sony has a global footprint so distribution is not the issue. The phones get very high reviews and scores in the tech press, just now for example GSM Arena ranks the latest Xperia Z3 Compact as their best of class choice above the current iPhone 6 (and ahead of Samsung's Galaxy Alpha in that sub-compact under 5 inch screen flagship class).

The brand is excellent. Sony is not a newcomer to the handset industry either who has to establish a credibility. Globally, across all its products Sony stands for premium and has a global range of Sony stores so they have an exceptional retail presense just like Apple. 

Style-wise the Xperia range is not cheap and plasticky like the Galaxy Series or a weird form factor like Blackberry or running on a hopeless OS platform like Lumia. And obviously its not a cheap Chinese brand like Huawei or ZTE and not a cheap domestic brand like say Karbonn and Micromaxx. Since the Xperia range was introduced, the Sony smartphone range has been the nearest thing to the iPhone series that existed on Android. The closest rival. Sony a bit better in tech, Apple of course, being Apple. But Xperia didn't suffer from 'lesser Korean' quality perceptions that say an LG would have. Or the lost brand perception of Motorola. And Sony only sold smartphones and they were all in the premium price brackets, not extending to 100 dollar supercheap smartphones, just like Apple. The nearest thing to the iPhone series on the Android side has been Sony with its Xperia range.

So why is Apple selling the iPhone at obscene profits and Sony making a loss with the Xperia. This makes no sense to me. Absolutely bizarre. Which brings us to the only possible culprit. Price. Why was Sony selling those premium spec phones at such low prices in 2013 arleady (and the latest Xperias also in the 600 dollar price bracket, not in the 700 dollar-plus bracket where the iPhone 6 series now is)? Why? Because they were run by accountants or their marketing were morons (or possibly both). I bought an Xperia Z1 and loved it. I felt it was the best flagship phone I'd owned since beloved Nokia N-series flagships of the past. It was lovely. And it was premium. And even now, while i love my Samsung Galaxy K Zoom - for its camera - the rest of the phone is 'cheap' plasticky and pedestrian. The Xperia Z1 was cool, sexy, slick. A fabulous device to behold and to hold. I am seriously considering another Xperia purchase again soon.

But here's the point. I paid about 600 dollars in Hong Kong money of course for my Xperia Z1. I said at the time, I thought it was so great value for all the awesome tech it had (20mp camera, waterproof etc) that I would have happily paid more for it. Yes, I would not have blinked at paying 700 dollars for it last year. But why was it priced at 600 dollars? Because the marketing heads at Sony are nincompoops who had fallen into the trap that there is no air above the iPhone. That there is some imaginary price ceiling and you can't sell premium phones that cost more than 600 dollars (because that was what the base price of the then-current iPhone 5 cost at the time). Idiots!

I had been arguing on this blog for YEARS that there is plenty of room above that iPhone price ceiling. That clever smartphone makers should explore the prices towards the $1,000 dollar level. And i argued Apple itself should also abandon the 600 dollar point and move both above it and below it (as Apple now has done thankfully). I now even have on my blog the latest price pyramid that clearly illustrates there is a pricing anomaly, totally bizarre, that clearly suggests there is plenty of customer acceptance of premium smartphones into the 'above iPhone' price level from 600 to at least 1,000 dollar unsubsidised price level.

And was I right? That is EXACTLY what Apple now did with the iPhone 6. It went for a higher price and is reaping a massive profit windffall with that smart pricing move. But listen, my dear readers. Apple went from 4 inch smartphones to 5 inch smartphones in 2014, and jumped from 600 dollar price levels to 700 dollar price levels with that change. When did Sony makes this jump in its smartphone screen sizes (and the other specs)? A year earlier. THAT is when Sony should have jumped its prices ABOVE THOSE OF APPLE.

If instead of my Sony Xperia Z1 costing 600 dollars, it would have cost 700 dollars, would have there been less sales, yes. Some people would see it as too much. But clearly - CLEARLY - Apple has shown there is a market for 700 dollar phones if you show them value for it. The specs of the Xperia range matched or EXCEEDED the iPhone 6 series already the previous year. Sony should have raised its prices. If it sold the Xperia top flagship for 700 dollars or even just 650 dollars rather than 600 dollars, the Xperia unit would be profitable today. Would it cost a bit of market share, yeah. Would it help Sony establish or strengthen its brand perception if its FLAGSHIP costs more than an iPhone? Gosh, Marketing 101, OF COURSE. And look at those specs. The Xperia of 2013 is a better phone than the iPhone 6 today. The current Xperia series wipes the floor with the iPhone. But when you are CLEARLY superior to the uber-desirable iPhone and you ALSO price yourself above it, suddenly there is more DEMAND for your product. What was the phone that is better than an iPhone?

And you know what. There are always customers (not necessarily many) who will walk into a store, talk to the sales rep and ask 'whats your most expensive (whatever)'. So. Whats the most expensive phone? If Xperia costs 700 dollars when the iPhone cost 600, the sales rep of course pulls proudly out the Xperia from the shelf and says this Sony. Then the customer asks why is it more expensive than the iPhone (or whatever brand they know). This is the FAVORITE question for any sales rep on commission. He will have memorized every detail of course of the most expensive model and happily show every aspect of where the current flagship Xperia is better than the iPhone or Galaxy or Lumia or whatever that customer happened to mention. Whatever slight market share would have been lost by raising the price to the 'outrageous' level slightly above the iPhone - would then have been MORE THAN GAINED BACK if this is the favorite phone of most sales reps in phone stores to sell - because for exactly the same sales effort that sales rep earns a bigger commission on the more expensive product - and legitimately the Xperia IS a better phone than the iPhone (on specs, that the sales rep can easily demonstrate, I am not now concerned about which is better to use, etc, so for a customer who is not already locked into iPhones and iLust). So the sales rep has LEGITIMATE issues - and a bucketload of them - to show WHY this phone is simply the best. And costs only slightly more haha... Win the soul of the sales rep and you can't lose. How can Sony not see this?

So today as the iPhone 6 series cost 700 and 750 dollars, the top Xperias should cost 800 and 850 dollars. Obviously now, January 2015, Sony can't suddenly jump the existing model prices but when they release the next models, jump up the prices. Not by 250 dollars but in increments of maybe 50 dollars at a time. And conveniently for Sony, their release cycle of Xperia flagships is not one per year like Apple. Sony do it twice per year. So this time next year the flagship should cost 700 dollars and summer of next year 750, and after that they are off with the races to test how far above the iPhone can the price of Xperia rise. Of course this means they also do have to have some clearly better tech specs than the current iPhone line but currently they have that in spades, so thats no problem. This is basics of marketing. But what is Sony doing? We just learned that they LOWERED the prices across all Xperia for example in India. Exactly the wrong answer when their product line is deeply in the red. There are idiots in charge.

This is not a problem in engineering. The product is great. This is incompetence in marketing. This is bad management. Sony handset unit was run by some accountant not a marketing man. The reason Sony is making a loss with Xperia is not because of bad phones, not because of a bad brand, not because of bad customer experiences, not because of a bad OS. The phones are brilliant. They are consistently rated among the best. They easily justfify the price they have but they could have commanded a significantly higher price because on the exact specs, there is no competitor. So if you are not doing a rival of identical specs, why are you limiting your prices to the inferior rival then? BAD MARKETING. Idiots in charge.

So, as just a bit of advice to Sony City in Tokyo: Before you sell the Xperia, this has the makings of the next best profit engine on the planet after the iPhone if you keep it in the Sony family. Why not fire the morons who got the unit into this MARKETING mess. The devices are beautiful and they beat the iPhone hands down. Go hire an aggressive marketing boss from a really competitive consumer giant like say Coca Cola or something and give the Xperia unit the marketing management it deserves.

SO LETS SELL XPERIA UNIT

So ok, maybe they don't read CDB blog regularly at Sony HQ (haha, you'd be surprised to see what all companies visit this blog on a nearly religious basis). What if we sell it. What could Sony's Xperia unit be worth? Well, we have two good case studies from very recently. The loss-making Nokia handset business was sold for 7.2 Billion dollars. Nokia's smartphones had a market share of 3% when it was sold (but it also included the dumbphones business, and Nokia did not extinguish its hold of the Nokia brand, only rented out a time-limited exclusive use of Nokia brand to sell phones). Then there is the Motorola deal, Google selling, Lenovo buying, another loss-making smartphone business. That included the full Moto brand and Lenovo paid 3 Billion for it. Motorola's market share was about 2% in smartphones at the time. So if we just consider the market share as a metric (this is very highly simplified) then in Nokia's case one point of market share cost 2.4 Billion dollars while in Motorola's case 667 million dollars. If we take their average, we get a number of 1.5 Billion dollars per point of market share. Currently Sony has just under 3% market share so we could guess that a ballpark price for the Xperia unit could be in the 4.5 Billion dollar range, give or take say a Billion.

So its not cheap by any means but hey, if Lenovo paid 3 Billion to buy 2 points more of market share in the smartphone wars to leapfrog Huawei and Xiaomi to 3rd ranking, why wouldn't a rival now pay 4.5 Billion to jump back ahead of Lenovo to third ranking. So if a Huawei or LG or ZTE or Xiaomi for example wanted to take a short-cut up the rankings from the midfield up ahead, and pick up a premium brand as well, then buying Sony's Xperia business would be a rare opportunity now. Buying Blackberry or HTC would not give any meaningful gain in market share, so this is a rather rare opportunity. And differing from Motorola and Nokia/Lumia, the Xperia unit has been profitable about a year ago, not many years ago like the others. Arguably, Sony's handset business is not as sick as those others were.

LOOKING FOR BUYERS

Who would be interested? Well, who wouldn't. If you're in the Top 10 and it is a rough battle in the midfield, then this is how you can escape the daily grind and get ebough scale to have a bit of a size cushion to the next ones down the rankings. So Samsung wouldn't think of buying it. Apple has no use for it. But the next tier all would or should consider it. Huawei to leapfrog Lenovo again. Xiaomi to at least climb back on parity with Lenovo. Lenovo itself to put more distance between itself and the mid-field. Or any others in the Top 10 like Coolpad, LG, ZTE. Or even just outside it, like HTC. I joked on Twitter that if Ballmer was still in charge at Microbrains, he'd buy Xperia now to 'boost' the Windows Phone ecosystem, force Xperia to run on WP, and then that would ruin whats left of Xperia just like how Windows Phone ruined Lumia. But yeah, Nadella is a smart dude, he wont' throw good money after bad as the Lumia unit is bleeding money and 1 in 3 Lumia smartphones that was ever manufactured and shipped to retail, was never even activated.

Equally any smaller or local brand that has deep-pocketed owners and aspired to take over the world, could use this purchase to achieve that. So the Micromax and Karbonn and MiFone and Solo and all the other local brands we see. Most have nowhere the money to do this, but a few do have rich owners who may have gotten quite badly the handset bug and now could fulfill that dream of becoming a Top 10 player. Then however they wanted, use the local brand and global brand in some mix like say Jaguar was bought by Tata Motors of India and now surprisingly, Jaguar is hiring more employees in Britain. Or Geely out of China becomes the first Chinese car maker to export cars to the USA. You don't want a Geely branded car? Don't worry it won't be. They are the guys who bought the Volvo brand. So you'll see Volvos sold in America (but now the brand comes from China and is owned by Geely). Sony's Xperia unit is exactly this kind of premium brand option for a local brand. If say Micromax wanted to sell its own brand as the discount brand and (Sony) Xperia as the premium brand. And use its own India distribution to boost Xperia success in India and at the same time piggyback on the Sony Xperia sales distribution network to bring Micromax low-end smartphones to the world either as Micromax branded or perhaps as discount Xperia models.

What of possible others? We have seen Intel pine about the phone business from time to time. They could buy Xperia. Some former phone making tech giants may have had a change of heart, say Dell or HP for example, return via Xperia. Amazon fell flat with its Fire as did Facebook with that HTC phone. They wanted into phones, have money to invest. Now they could do it properly and with the missing link, global distribution, that ruined their previous plans. Could be the way back in.

Or brands that missed the smartphone opportunity could now find a backdoor in, like say Nikon or Nintendo. Take Nikon. Their CEO has said Nikon made a mistake not taking the cameraphones seriously. He clearly wishes they'd made a move earlier (and may be launching a smartphone soon). Well, Sony Xperia phones have some of the best cameras going. That would be a perfect launch pad for Nikon to bring its camera competence to the phones market and be a serious player. Or what of Nintendo, another tech giant that has recently admitted they didn't enter the smartphone industry in time. This is their chance to catch up on the missed opportunity. Sony Xperia phones are some of the best that currently exist for gaming. Toss in Wii gaming compatibility for now, then add the proper 'true' gaming phones later next year. Easy-peasy.

Two rich guys might be interested. World's richest man Carlos Slim is now forced to sell parts of his Telmex/America Movil empire (largest carrier group of Latin America far bigger than AT&T or Verizon) but he got to be richest man through mobile. If he can't have as many toys in the carrier space, he could take some of his vast fortune and buy the Xperia unit almost with spare change he has laying around the house haha. And then he could buy those MIcrosoft-Nokia factories in Mexico that are idling, and switch the Xperia production to Mexico where the labor costs are very low and massive markets sit next door who would love to see bigger push of Sony Xperia smartphones at 'better than iPhone' specs haha. With a real businessman in charge... It could be a better investment than say buying pieces of European carriers like he's been doing a bit recently.

Then there is Hong Kong's richest man Li Ka-Shing. He has been building his fortune in many fields but was very wise early to mobile and has bought and sold many operators and stlil controls much of the Hutchison ie Three operator family internationally. What not many know, is that Three also launched its own handsets that sold in modest quantities. So he's already dabbled in the handset space. I am pretty sure he's looked at the iPhone many many times and thought how he'd be able to also make profits if a good handset opportunity came along with the scale it would need. Well, here is the Xperia, nearest thign to the iPhone on Android and a lost child who just needed a rich daddy to help it onto its feet. Li Ka-Shing has often bought underperforming telecoms assets, turned them around, and not been afraid to sell them on too. Could be a buyer candidate haha..

WEIRD BUT PLAUSIBLE

So then what of Nokia itself? They've already expressed their desire to re-enter the handset space with their first tablet already announced, and it runs on Android. I wrote on this blog of the Hollywood ending to the Lumia saga, if Nokia bought back the remnants of the ruined Microsoft business. But that was before anyone said Xperia was available. Now, why not Nokia? They were a phone maker, they want to come back but on Android. Xperia is already fully on Android. Nokia was in the process of attempting to migrate its handset business from dumbphones to smartphones but now Xperia is already finished with that journey. Nokia has a long history fo taking loss-making telecoms businesses and turning them around into profitable businesses, like Siemens and Motorola networking units.

So think about it. Many who would want to buy Sony Xperia unit would really want also the Sony brand for a long period as their premium brand, so any Huawei or ZTE or Micromaxx or Xiaomi, just like how Lenovo uses Motorola as their premium brand and TCL just bought Palm. Similar to how Toyota uses Lexus, Volkswagen uses Audi etc. But Nokia will get to return to using its own brand from next year. Nokia doesn't need the Sony brand at all, it could just buy the Xperia brand now, run that for the remains of this year, and slap on a Nokia badge on the phones from January 2016. Voila, premium smartphone slabs like any other Android flagship but at honestly N-Series style superb specs, that have a 3% market share and are actually larger than Lumia sales according to the latest numbers we had from Q3 of 2014 haha (lets see if that holds now for Q4). And Nokia was paid 7.2 Billion dollars by Microsoft to take the handset business when Nokia had 3% market share. Now it could probably buy Sony's Xperia business for 4.5 Billion dollars and still have 3% market share. Compared with an organic growth from zero starting to sell smartphones again next year, this is a massive jump back into the game, and as a Top 10 manufacturer.

I am sure, that if Nokia was given one brand to pick among all smartphone makers in the world other than Samsung or Microsoft (for their scale), the one they would most like to buy would be Sony. It was always (all the way back through the SonyEricsson years) the nearest thing to the N-Series there ever was in the market. Very often customers were making their last choice among say Symbian phone options in the 2000s decade, between a Nokia and a SonyEricsson whatever the exact price point and specs were. So this would not be a huge change from the types of (top-end) phones that Nokia used to make especially in its N-Series unit. And look at the MeeGo based N9 and its sisters, again, very similar to what the first Xperia Z was two years later. And with Xperia, Nokia would regain a global sales footprint and a premium sales and marketing process, so that would not be vastly different from what they'd do if they built it all again. And NOKIA - yes Nokia - would not make the marketing mistakes that Sony did. This unit would be profitable in a year, easily with Nokia running it. Then if Nokia wanted to return to the global stage 'only as a premium' phone brand, in the style of the iPhone rather than as a mass market brand this would be the fastest way to that. Or if they wanted to expand back to a global mass market juggernaut, its way way easier to do that from 3% and a global retail presence than from zero. And if you married Nokia brand with Xperia this would seem very appealing in very very many markets. Not to mention, the one brand the carrier community would most welcome back to handsets is the 'old' Nokia.

And the Reuters article says Sony is interested in either selling the unit or finding a partner. Well, that sounds a lot like SonyEricsson partnership that really didn't go that well. But you know what, Nokia was the nearest thing to Ericsson - except for the Japanese, Finns are FAR more like the Japanese than Swedes are, it would be less painful haha. And what about Nokia? They set up the joint venture NokiaSiemens Networks that existed for nearly a decade until Nokia bought Siemens out of that partnership. So Nokia - and specifically this 'Networking side' of Nokia that is left (as opposed to the Microsoftian handset side that was sold) is exactly the kind of entity that happily does joint ventures if that is the way forward. I would be surprised if both Sony and Nokia aren't exploring this possibility because the fit is that good. But considering how much Nokia wants to return to handsets, they would be quite happy to buy the Sony unit outright if Sony is seriously willing to sell. And no, the Sony brand would not be needed for one day...

Which would set up a really hilarious scenario. Microsoft selling fake Nokias as Lumia without Nokia branding. Nokia selling pretend-Nokias as the Xperia without Nokia branding. And Microsoft would still sell real Nokia dumbphones with the Nokia branding. How weird would that be this year...

And here's my open pledge. I love the Sony Xperia line. If anyone buys the unit, I will deliver one full day of my consulting for free any time between the deal announced officially, and one month after the deal has closed. As to Sony management, no, I can't give you that deal but I'll do a near equivalent. You guys can get 2 days of my consulting for the price of 1 day (its almost the same as 1 day for free haha) if you want to revive the unit. That offer stands up to the date that you announce the unit has been sold. And seriously Sony. This could be your iPhone, it should be your iPhone. Look at those specs and observe that Apple copied you and failed to match you. Why are you not creating the world's second biggest profits in handsets? Shame on you! You can do much better than this! Please do fix the proud decades-old Sony handset division, don't sell it now. That engineering is so good, why let the accountants ruin this opportunity. Put a real marketing person in charge. Go hire some American haha..

SAMSUNG WANTS TO BUY BLACKBERRY

So then the other bombshell. This I did not see coming at all. Yes, we knew Blackberry had been looking for buyers for quite a while, and thinking of maybe splitting itself up and sell a part or whatever. Now out of the blue, Samsung is in the news, according to Reuters, has already made an offer of 7.5B dollars to buy Blackberry. No, Sammy does not need 0.7% market share of a troubled QWERTY smartphone maker and yet another OS to manage Blackberry OS in addition to phones on Android and Tizen (and possibly even the return to Windows Phone haha). No. The reason Sammy wants BeeBee is the patents portfolio according to Reuters. And this is because of the ongoing legal fights with Apple that clearly show no sign of subsiding.

This is far further along than than the Sony rumor as there are both a buyer and seller and there is a price on the table. What do I think of this? First, the patents obviously make sense. They would be worth something like that level yes. And as BB has such a trivial market share, nobody would complain about this merger whereas if Samsung tried to buy some major player they might run into regulatory problems.

What would they do? Blackberry is not far from being profitable. Samsung would now offer synergies out of scale in sourcing, manufacturing, distribution and marketing. That alone should bring BB safely back into the black. And then Sammy has its semiconductor business that would further boost BB profitability. Samsung would gain its 'E Series' clone haha on that old 'lets follow Nokia strategy' strategy. Yes its on a different OS but over time Sammy would merge the BB OS project into Tizen. If Blackberry was wary of attempting a slider/folder Blackberry with both full-size touch screen and full wide QWERTY rather than the BB compromises we've seen, Samsung would have no fear to try that on a Blackberry flagship and this I've been writing for a long time, would be a big hit phone as old Nokia E7s and simliar phones are on their last legs now. So Sammy could actually revive the BB market share into something like 2% or so,

In the mobile services industry there would be a bonus. BBM .Blackberry Messenger was at one point the planet's biggest messaging OTT service and its still today a big anchor for Blackberry loyalty (but used on increasingly ancient phones). If Samsung bought Blackberry, they would also gain BBM. Imagine this as a competitive advantage. 365 million phones shipping per year with BBM on it. In two years BBM has 700 million active users which is Whatsapp's size today. And here is potentially a big loyalty key that would differentiate all Samsung devices on Android from rival brands and build Samsung loyalty. 7.5 Billion is a high price for such a tiny player but yeah, the patents portfolio is rich and worth it. And few in the 'West' know that Samsung actually sells 'Blackberry clones' with QWERTY keyboards (in modest numbers) similar to how Nokia had its E Series. So even that synergy is not as bizarre as it may seem on first sight. But now Samsung would gain a separate brand for its QWERTY line.

And then consider North America. Imagine a hybrid of the best of Galaxy with the best of Blackberry, running Android and including BBM and of course a physical QWERTY keyboard in a couple of form factors. Its kind of what we hoped Blackberry's 10 series would be but wasn't. And on Android the full Android apps portfolio rather than the modest BB offering. And brand it Blackberry. Blackberry on Android and manufactured by Samsung. But with top cameras like Sammys etc. This could be a big comeback vehicle for North America where once the very word smartphone was synonymous with Blackberry. This is not the need for Samsung which already is far larger in the US than BB, but for BB it could be a recovery that alone they cannot achieve with their modest resources. Yes I like this development and for Blackberry they would get the rich owner they deserve to have a revival. Alone they are now too small to ever be able to do it. And a Blackberry running on Android but still including BBM? That anyone would love to see,

(BTW shortly after I posted this, there is news that both Blackberry and Samsung have denied this news story. Pretty solid if both sides immediately deny it haha but still, the meeting might have happened and regardless of whether it did happen, this deal could happen eventually)

Yes its a different era now in the Bloodbath, the survival of the fittest stage, when companies start to exit and die and be sold and bought and merge. And when I wrote my year 2015 Smartphone Bloodbath preview on 2 January, I did say about both Sony and Blackberry that they may well be sold this year. Well, so far nothing has been announced, its only rumors at this stage but don't be surprised if there are mergers and acquisitions this year. The Bloodbath has entered that phase. So. Whose next? HTC? LG?

Tizen Finally Launches First Smartphone: Samsung Z1 entry-level 4 inch smartphone costs 91 USD in India without subsidy

Well its about time! Samsung after countless delays and teases, finally releases the first Tizen based smartphone. Its not what we were first promised, a top-end near flagship spec smartphone. Now Tizen looks like this coulda been just another bada device (and therefore, gosh, why the 3 year wait). Yes, an entry-level smatphone of very modest specs and low unsubsidised price well below 100 US dollars.

The Tizen based Samsung Z1 went on sale today in India. It has a 4 inch touch screen and a 3mp main camera and 0.3mp res selfie cam. But ok ok, at least its not as moronic as the first Lumia devices that didn't even have the selfie cam at all haha and cost far more than this. But yes, what else does the Z1 give you? The screen resolution is modest at 800x480 pixels. The phone comes with 4GB of internal storage but the microSD cards accept 64GB more. The rear camera does have LED flash. It does have WiFi, BT and GPS. Its a dual SIM phone and it has FM radio. The battery is (of course) removable. A ho-hum specs device with nothing of a Wow factor but nothing really missing either. 

Ok. It costs 5,700 Indian Rupee (91 US dollars) unsubsidised price. I am definitely not an 'expert' on the sub 100 dollar smartphone market in India but a quick look at global market offering suggest that from the cheap-phone masters, Nokia, sorry Microsoft, we get a Lumia 435 at slightly lower about 80 USD price for which you get same specs as Z1 but differences are: camera only 2mp not 3mp, but memory is better internal memory 8GB and microSD supporting 128GB, The Lumia is not a dual SIM device (I think, doesn't seem to be by GSMArena specs summary). Obviosly Lumia runs on Windows Phone.

From Samsung's own Galaxy series the nearest rival is I think the Galaxy Ace running Android, that was released half a year ago and sells for about 6,000 INR today in India. It matches most Z1 specs but gives a 5mp main camera rather than 3mp.

So on a very cursory search, the Tizen based Z1 seems to be very 'typical' specs for that price point in today's market. Being Samsung brand, it should sell well, as the growth is all in the low-cost area and remembering for example Lumia, most devices sold were at the bottom of their price range.

THE MARKETING TRICK

But the Samsung Z1 and Tizen have a party piece. Not on the phone or on Tizen itself, but via the marketing bundle. Samsung has achieved a marketing campaign partnership with India-based cable TV provider NexGTv who have bundled a cable TV subscription with cable TV box, worth 28 US dollars, into the promotion. It gives access to 7,000 Bollywood movies plus of course typical cable TV services. That is a big deal and a huge bonus value at this price point. The Z1 also includes 3 months of free music from Hungama (one of India's biggest digital content providers) and more free content from Club Samsung. This sounds like a great offer to entice new customers to a platform where Tizen obviously will be rather barren as to games and services in its app store now at launch.

So its now out, actually being sold, finally. Tizen. The latest OS to join the Bloodbath, two years behind schedule and with a totally revised strategy from what it originally promised. But we have one device out now, from Samsung, in one market. Yes, India is the third largest smartphone market globally, thats not a bad thing but now Samsung does need to expand the reach of Tizen, more phones more countries. And the platform does need validation from other hardware makers, so hopefully by next year there will be more than just Samsung making Tizen smartphones. Can the Z1 give Tizen 1% market share by the end of this year. No. That needs more but this is a start and hopefully Sammy is serious about Tizen and gives us more phones in more markets and gives Tizen its full chance.

TIZEN CHANCES

For the tiny OS providers, Blackberry, Firefox, Windows Phone this is bad news. The world's largest tech company, largest mobile phone handset maker and largest smartphone maker now launched its own OS and a low-cost smartphone where all the growth is. Lets see how this pans out. Samsung tends to be very secretive about its phone business specifics in its quarterly releases, so we are likely not going to hear much about the early performacne of Tizen but maybe we'll get some India market stats and then of course we have to rely on the analysis by the big 3 handset analyst houses, how do they report Tizen OS market shares in the coming quarters. 1% for the year is not really possible but 1% by Christmas Quarter is perhaps the best Samsung could desire, which would make them bigger than Blackberry now and give Tizen the right to talk about being the fourth biggest OS haha... That would mean selling about 5 million smartphones in the Christmas Quarter Q4 so Samsung would need many more countries added to India to have that kind of sales levels for Tizen. But lets see if that comes true or they linger in 5th place still this time a year from now.

Now for comparison, two recent launches that are very relevant compaisons. Samsung itself launched a new OS five years ago called bada. In 12 months for its fourth Quarter Tizen had 1% market share. In 24 months for its 8th quarter, Tizen was up to 3% of all smartphones sold worldwide. That is what Samsung can do with its own OS, probably, if it is as serious about Tizen onw as it was about bada back then.

So for comparison, lets take what the world's largest handset maker and world's largest smartphone maker can do under similar conditions. Nokia while it ran on Symbian and Meego, launched on a new OS Windows Phone, the Lumia line three years ago. In the first 12 months, Lumia grew to 2% market share in its fourth Quarter, which then grew further to 3% global market share in the next year, for its 8th Quarter. That is a model for us. If Samsung is serious about Tizen, it should achieve those kinds of numbers, between 1% and 2% in the first 12 months, and about 3% after 24 months from now. If Tizenis on that path at those intervals, this is a project run reasonably well. If Tizen is below those points, then this project is in trouble. If Samsung manages to do better than those points, then it would signal a strong potential for Tizen. But lets be serious, don't expect 10% in two years haha.

The target numbers are thus 5 million Tizen smartphones sold for Q4 of 2015 and 16M for Q4 of 2016. That would mean that by the end of this year for Q4 about 5% of Samsung's total handset production would run on Tizen and at the same time in 2016, about 15% of Samsung handsets would feature Tizen as the OS.

And one last note - IF Samsung is able to convince other handset makers to join making Tizen smarphones, THEN the upscale potential is higher than these numbers...

Grand Convergence Means Grand Competition (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Samsung, etc and all the mobile operators/carriers)

I talk about competition very much in my conferences and workshops around the world. It is frequently a requested topic and I have written on it quite a lot in my books from 3G Marketing the fastest-selling telecoms book of all time which focused on competition, customer loyalty, churn, segmentation etc from inside the telecoms operator world and competing against other telecoms operators; to Digital Korea the first case study of the area of Grand Convergence. Grand Convergence is what I call the massive collision of 17 major global industries heading into digital and mobile from music and gaming to advertising and broadcast, from internet and telecoms to insurance and banking. And all sorts of industries inbetween. A grand collision of 17 global industries that I often liken to a death-match, where giants like Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung try to eat the lunches of Vodafone, Telefonica, AT&T and China Mobile (and vice versa) where some players like print publishers and camera makers are dying, other industries like watch-makers and mapping companies are under siege and some aren't even aware they are being ambushed like banks and insurance companies.

Why does Facebook buy Whatsapp? Why does Microsoft buy Nokia's handset business? Why does Apple launch the Apple Watch? Why does Samsung launch an operating system? Why are Bharti Airtel, MTN and America Movil launching payment systems across their telecoms footprints? These are all early warm-up steps in the big battle of Grand Convergence. Thats why Google launched Android, why Microsoft bought Skype, why Vodafone launched M-Pesa and Apple launched the iPhone. They were testing the waters. Is this Grand Convergence for real. It is. Lets dig in.

GRAND CONVERGENCE

I have been collecting industries into this theory I call 'Grand Convergence'. Note that this is not a mapping of all industries. To qualify, the industry has to be large enough, global in scope and be clearly headed to become mostly if not completely digital in nature. So farming is not in the picture as is not forest management nor fishing, all huge industries. Retail, hotels, restaurants can yes use digital tech, especially on mobile, but they won't be replaced by digital (completely). Airlines around the world will continue to fly over a billion passengers per year. Yes they'll give us a mobile boarding pass, let us buy the airline ticket online and manage our frequent flier program via the internet but they still need those jet planes from Boeing and Airbus to physically fly us from one airport to the next (until some day Apple will introduce iPortation their teleportation service on perhaps the iPhone 9 haha).

So I've been mappiing what industries are either totally digital from the start or will become essentially totally digital in about a decade or so. So far I've found 17 industries which have some overlap but mostly can be identified as their own businesses with clearly defined products and services and identifyable customer segments. They are mapped in this slide I keep showing around the world about the Grand Convergence:




The above slide by Tomi T Ahonen may be freely shared

So  we have the obvious ones, telecoms, internet, media, computers, cameras. Google says the future of the internet is mobile, so too says Yahoo. Microsoft, HP and Intel have said the future of the computer industry is mobile. Apple Computer dropped the 'Computer' from its official corporate name and calls itself now a moblie company. 90% of all cameras in use are on mobile phones not on stand-alone cameras, film-based or digital. And yes, in 5 out of 6 cases, if you call a random telephone number on the planet, it rings on a mobile phone not a fixed landline phone. Part of this picture is familiar territory.

Some parts are newer, Social Media most obviously is a new industry that is only about a decade old as a viable business now (anyone remember MySpace haha). The virtual worlds market is similar new industry. Others are smaller and less broadly reported on, like mapping and marketing research. And some are classic big industries but far past their prime such as the wristwatch and clock industry.

You notice in the above picture that all arrows are the same length but are a different thickness. The thickness illustrates the size of the industry in very rough terms but the wider the arrow, the bigger the industry. Telecoms is a 2 Trillion dollar industry (mobile most of that). Print is about a Trillion dollar industry. Advertising is about a 500 Billion dollar industry while music is a 25 Billion dollar industry. I have tried to arrange the industries so that typically 'similar' industries are near each other, so the internet is between telecoms and computers, and broadcast media sits between print media and music. The relevant point is that these 17 industries are in the death-match, they cannot avod digital and they will all become mostly 'mobile' industries in this decade and the next. A retailer or hotel or restaurnt or car manufacturer can decide whether they want to add digital/mobile parts to their business. These 17 industries do not have a choice. They find themselves in the deathmatch. The giants in these 17 industries will literally disappear if they don't adapt. And even adapting is no guarantee of success.

HOW FAR HAVE THEY GONE MOBILE

So I do an annual review of where the industries of Grand Convergence sit, on their migration to mobile. We just heard that games have hit the point where mobile gaming now accounts for more reevenues than console gaming, so mobile has become the largest part of the gaming industry but is not yet half of the revenues (as there are for example still PC/internet gaming). So I say 45% of the gaming industry has migrated to mobile (roughly speaking, rounding off to the nearest 5 percent). (Strangely, nobody else publishes numbers or any data on this grand race, even as its the biggest contest on the planet. The total race is worth 7 Trillion dollars in 2014, thats much more than global car industry or airline industry or travel or housing or food or war).




The above slide by Tomi T Ahonen may be freely shared

This is what I call the 'map to your career' to anyone who sees any of my presentations. This is the ultimate guide to where the dangers are, who are your most dangerous competirors and where there might be easy wins for you. So telecoms has seen 85% of its journey completed to moblie. The Fixed Landline telecoms business is in severe decline with many countries already past 50% of all households having gone pure mobile (as Finland did first among advanced industrialized countries that achieved 100% household telephone penetration rates in the past decades. The Emerging World then leapfrogged this obsolescent technology and went directly to mobile telecoms).

But take banking for example. They are clueless about this looming disaster on their horizon. Bankers are still trying to get their heads around the types of threats from new digital currencies and don't yet even fully understand why BItcoin is merely an obscure gambling instrument but mobile money will demolish cash. Apple's Apple Pay will not be the world's predominant moblie payment system but they did finally last year help convince the skeptics in the financial world that mobile money is real. Even so, few bankers accept mobile money is inevitable. My readers know all about this as I wrote the worlds' first book on mobile payments (Pearls Vol 3 Mobile Money).

So yeah. Reality check for those of you who are not regular readers of the CDB blog. Sweden is on plans to abolish cash as is Kenya, Somalia and Turkey. Estonians have a national Identity card on their moblles which allowed them to vote in the national elections. South Koreans have an identity SIM card on whch all bank and credit card identities are converged. Turkey was the first country to set the target date to end the manufacturing of cash. Coins were invented in Turkey and cash has powered the global economy 3,000 years. We will be the first humans alive to live in a post-cash economy and its powered by mobile. But is that what you read and hear in conferences about money? The presentation is just as much about how to fit 10 keys onto the plastic credit card or how to do colors and holograms in coins to make them less easy to forge. This is exactly like the Captain of the Titanic seeing the ice berg ahead and orderig the patio chairs to be rearranged on the sun deck.

IF YOU DON'T ADAPT, YOU DIE

So yes, 85% of telecoms is now mobile and 90% of camera business is mobile. That industry - cameras - gives us an interesting 'warning' about Grand Convergence. If you don't adapt, you die. Lets look at the global camera industry and the 'Golden Decade of Photographs' for a lesson. The camera industry has grown on a steady clip for over 150 years. Every decade, roughly speaking, the total global camera populatoin doubled. There were great innovations that helped push the camera industry forward bringing cheaper cameras and cheaper film and faster film-processing to expand the total camera population. We had the Kodak Brownie camera, and the Kodak film cassette innovations up to the consumer 110 film cartridge. And eventually such amazing things as flash 'cubes' so basic cameras could have a flash, and then there was Polaroid's family of instant cameras ever better and faster (Like Outcast sang in his big hit: shake it like a Polaroid Picture). And for a while the basic camera tech was so cheap, it was built into cheap disposable cameras that came pre-installed with a roll of Kodak fillm inside the throw-away, use-only-once camera.

So that pattern held very nicely up to year 2000. At that time the world had about 300 million total cameras in use worldwide (almost all were film-based cameras, Apple's Quicktake 100 the world's first consumer-oriented digital camera had only appeared in 1994 and year 2000 saw only about 9 million digital cameras sold worldwide, a tiny slice of the global camera sales that year. The cameraphone had not even been invented yet.

In year 2000 the four giant camera manufacturers were Minolta, Nikon, Canon and Konica of Japan. The world's lsrgest film makers were Kodak and Polaroid. These six were the six giants of the camera industry and they were about to enter the Golden Decade of Photography. If the normal growth pattern in cameras had continued, the planet would go from 300 million people owning a camera (5%) to 600 million by year 2010 (10% of the planet's population of any age and across all continents). It would be a great time because the growth in the decade would match the size of the industry at the start of the decade. Everybody loves an industry that doubles in size every decade.

But the Golden Decade of Photography was far better than that. The total worldwide population of cameras did not double from year 2000 to 2010. It did not trple or quadruple. It grew 10 fold !!! Yes by year 2010 there were a massive 3.5 Billion cameras in use worldwide and literally 50% of the planet's population owned a camera by year 2010. Wow. This was the true explosion of cameras. So what happened to the giants in the Golden Decade of Cameras? Minolta quit the camera business. Konica quit the camera business. Kodak went bankrupt during hte Golden Decade of Photography. Polaroid went bankrupt.. twice. 

In year 2010 the world's bestseling camera brand was Nokia. The world's most used camera brand was Nokia. The second largest was not Nikon or Canon. It was Samsung and Apple sold more cameras on its iPhones than Nikon or Canon total annual production. But here is the frightening part - in year 2000 Nokia had not produced one cameraphone. Neither had Samsung nor Apple. In less than a decade these newcomers wiped out global giants. Nikon and Canon only survived by retreating into the professional and semi-pro camera niche segments. Kodak and Polaroid are very late to the game when they release their cameraphones now for 2015 (only 14 years after the first cameraphone was launched by Sharp in Japan) and Nikon CEO has suggested they may be also doing their first smartphone later this year.

This is the lesson of my theory of the Grand Convergence. It is a death-match. These 17 industries and every major player from those indiustriees is locked into this fight. They find themselves locked into a cage where everyone fights everyone and most will die. That is why Google offers us mapping, Apple launched its payments system and mobile operators in India offer us FM radio content via cellular. This is a deathmatch. Anyone in that picture is a rival who can eat you cake like Nokia and Samsung ate that of Minolta and Konica and Kodak, or anyone can be the victim who dies and will go into the dustbin of history. This is the Grand Competition within the Grand Convegence.

OPERATORS ARE BAD AT INNOVATION

So first, the telecoms operators/carriers. These are the giants who were early to this race and beat out their older rivals from the landline side. Do you remember more than a decade ago when BT sold its wireless business as did AT&T? For a while it was the rage, fixed landline operators divesting their mobile sides 'because of saturation' haha. I was arguing loudly that it is foolish and against all the evidence of this new industry but it happened. Look what happened later, AT&T's brand was sold to rival Cingular (a mobile operator/carrier in the USA) and in Britain BT is now shopping for a mobile operator to be able to return to the industry it abandoned.

But what about all those who were 'wise' to this convergence? Vodafone and TeliaSonera and Orange and Telefonica, T-Mobile. Telenor and China Mobile and Bharti Airtel and MTS and MTN and Axata and Zain and Vivo and America Movil (and the US carriiers too haha, Sprint, Verizon, AT&T). They are strong rich profit-making giants who have a long history of dabbling in the opportunities of Grand Convergence. Who remembers Vodafone Live? What happened to Sonera's Zed? The mobile operator industry is a vast graveyard of great ideas, executed horribly. Now yes, there are some exceptions, Vodafone's M-Pesa is likely the best example that something can be done beyond just providing a telephone connection. But apart from some national anomalies (NTT DoCoMo in Japan and its amazing lineup of highly successful and profitable service units from app stores to advertising to mobile money, yes the prototype of Apple Pay is NTT DoCoMo's Felica on NFC literally ten YEARS before Apple Pay) the operators/carriers hae been quite phenomenally inept at capturing any meaningful slice of this opportunity. They saw these diagrams (or early versions of it) literally more than a decade ago and essentially all major operator groups had projects to capture their place in that future. Today they are threatened by Skype and Whatsapp and find that Google's Play Store and Apple's App Store are taking all the retail revenues that should belong to the gatekeeper's role (well, except for Japan and South Korea and a few other exceptions where the carriers were forward-thinking and not as greedy as in Europe and America and the rest of the world haha).

The mobile operator has all the assets and is the only entity with a direct contact to potentially every consumer in the market (when we get to 200% SIM card penetration rates shortly). That power is from the SIM card. The operators have a license form the national regulators to operate the cellular telecoms spectrum - a limited natural resource - and have an oligopolistic competitive environment in all markets. So its not open competition, its limited competition with 3G licenses granted for periods measured in decades. Thats as close to a monopoly as you can get legally haha. No wonder most operators are comfortably profitable and tend to view their markets as entitlements where digital rivals are not welcome like Skype and Whatsapp for example.

Now where is the movement in this chart? If we look at the big telecoms giants, China Mobile, Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, T-Mobile, America Movil etc. What do they provide out of this chart? Telecoms services. And some dabble in selling handsets under their own brand. But beyond that, internet maybe. But thats it. An occasional social media epxeriment or music platform. To dismal success. The main reason is tha the mobile telecoms industry kept growing so fast, and had near criminally profitable businesses like SMS that made any other things look tame and not worth doing. So the most phenomenal failure to capture a piece of the future was by the carriers. They didn't need to innovate so they didn't.

GOOGLE

So lets look at a few of the big rivals and what they are doing. First up Google who won this race already but now its a question of what else can they take with them into their victory lap. So Google obviously is the biggest entrant from the Internet industry. They studied this map very carefully and you remember a decade ago Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in his bombshell guest editorial to the Financial Times when he said the future of the internet was going to be mobile. Today we all accept that, but try to find other tech experts in 2004 who said that? (I said it ih my first books from 2002 haha). Yes today its clear but it was a radical thought ten years ago. Then he chanted 'moblile mobile mobile' in all internal meetings for years at Google and then talking to outsider partners he said 'put you best people on mobile'. Google saw this coming. And what did Google do four years after that landmark article in the FT where they signalled their intentions? Google launched Android. Not as an internet platform but as a mobile phone platform for smartphones (and later, also tablets, netbooks, TVs etc). This was Google's masterstroke and they have now become the entity with the biggest footprint out of the Grand Convergence. China Mobile the biggest mobile operator can reach 800 million pockets. But Google's Android is on 1.5 Billion devices, mostly smartphones. 

Because the biggest gadget by unit volume in the world sold today is a smartphone, and Android owns that industry with over 80% market share, Google has won. Because the second largest product category by unit sales of the digital connected devices is dumbphones, and now all handset experts agree with my early view, that all phones will become smartphones before this decade is done, yes Google will have Android reaching something like 80% of all pockets on the planet. And then the third largest digitally connected platform by units sold per year is tablets. And whose the biggest in tablets? Android. Who cares where Microsoft ends with some Windows on some PCs or Apple has a slice of some rich people with their iToys. Google won the war. They won it through stealth, with Android, and because Android is free, there can no longer be a global rival to take half that cake. Not in this decade and very very likely not in the next decade either.

All Google has to do is keep updating Android at a good refresh rate - Kitkats and Lollipops etc - and keep it free, then nobody can catch them anymore. Google gets into 1.5 Billion actual consumer devices today, its more than at its peak what Microsoft had with Windows or what Nokia ever had when both dumbphones and smartphones are added together. Google today has more active customers than any consumer brand has ever had concurrrently. Yes more than Timex was on human wrists at its peak or the number of people drinking Coca Cola or wearing Levi's blue jeans. And Google has only just started. It was 1.5 Billion people last year 2014, it will be 2.0 Billion at the end of this year and about 2.5 Billion consumers by end of next year 2016. No brand has been anywhere in that kind of stratosphere, essentially twice the reach of the next most popular brands the planet has ever seen. And even there Google will not be finished growing. So what is Google up to? Its already the biggest web browser and the biggest internet and mobile advertising platform so its big in the overall ad industry. They are our maps and they are on most of the smarthpones sold. What else? YouTube most obviously but Google is also interested to do money and want to connect the unconnected world and they also are preparing for 'the next big thing' ie Augmented Reality as the 8th mass medium beyond mobile, for the next big planetary digital race. Thats why we're seeing an early Google Glass and now an update to that concept next.

Why is Google in this game? They said in 2010 that if they achieve 500 million users on Android, it would be worth 10 Billion dollars per year to Google through their various services. Now they are three times that and by the end of the year will be four times that. Is the Android platform already delivering 30 Billion dollars of annual revenues to Google, probably not, but in the coming years, it will deliver more than that easily. Where is the money? We heard from the co-owner of this blog Alan Moore when he examined the mobile digital convergence opportuntiy in more detail in his second book Social Media Marketing. Alan is the guy who coined the term 'New Black Gold' for measuring our consumer behavior via our digital platforms, in particular through mobile at the epicenter of that activity. When mobile becomes as Ajit Jaokar explains 'our magic wand' it will have all the essential functions we would want. In Stockholm Sweden you can check into Clarion hotels and they'll have your hotel room key issued directly to your smartphone using NFC. Starbucks achieved 15% of its total revenues in the USA paid via mobile wallets. Finnair gets over 50% of its passengers using mobile check in. Talking of Starbucks, in Britain they partnered with Uber so that if you buy a coffee and pay by mobile, Uber will drive you to the nearest Starbucks for free. How cool is that? Estonia was the first country to hold a general election where people could vote via SMS. In Uganda and Kenya its totally normal to have your full salary paid to your mobile phone and all payments can be processed directly at one click from paying car payments and rents and student fees to yes, taxes. In Spain and Turkey you can sign contracts via SMS. The US state of Iowa has already started to issue driver's licences that are on mobile phones. Sri Lanka was the first country to declare its intent to be a 'mobile first' eGovernment provider. 

So its not that we bought x song from iTunes or subscribe to y station on digital media or watched z movie or liked it in Twitter or made a friend of that on Facebook. Yes all this is ALSO in our digital footprint and valuable. But how much MORE valuable is our digital footprint when it includes our keys and salaries and loyalty schemes and preferences of how we drive to work and where we consider going on a vacation and whether we voted in the last election etc? ALL of that will be potentially harvestable on only one device, the epicenter of Grand Convergence. Our mobile phones. That is what Google wants. Its what they said is the valuable part in mobile. And its for example what the world's largest advertising empire, WPP (owners of Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, Grey etc) Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell (aka SMS) said. He said the competitors of WPP are no longer the other advertising and media giants like Omnicom and Publicis. Its now the data guys like Gallup, Nielsen, GFK etc. This is Alan Moore's thought. The digital footprint we create, that is the new black gold. Or how he phrased it (I hope I remember it correctly) Social media intelligence is the new black gold of the 21st century. Google wants to be in every pocket so it can know as much as possible about us.

Why? So it can help us into the future, not unlike how Amazon now helps us find better books similar to what we looked at, or better DVDs and music CDs or whatever else we might want to buy. We don't find Amazon at all creepy, we love the recommendation engine. But its built on an incredible wealth of consumer behavior - across only a few categories of goods. Imagine this across everything we do, not just some of the things we buy. Google is sitting on the biggest data mining goldvein there ever was. And they are very cautiously starting to build their steps into that. They are in no hurry. They will not want to mess this up. But that is why I am totally confident, Android will always be free and nobody can catch Android now. Nobody can catch Google. Its their oyster, what they want to make of it, they can take their time and decide how to 'do no evil' while finding new businesses out of the digital Grand Convergence opportunity. And now that Google 'won' with Android, they don't have to 'destroy' anyone else to get a good-sized piece of the winnings down into the next decade and the decade after that.

APPLE

So what of Apple then? Sure, Apple makes the most desirable PCs and tablets and smartphones. They might succeed to take another industry in decline (watches) and find some profits out of that. But note, that these are all industries of hardware that are driven by Moore's Law into the toilet of thin margins. Like TVs before, an industry that once had Philips (aka Magnavox) and Matsushita (aka Panasonic) among the biggest and most profitable companies on the planet. Yes Apple makes the most desirable consumer tech products today but what happens to those margins not next year but by the next decade? it is a race to the bottom and until Apple can perfect Time Travel, the opportunity to milk exceptional profits as the most profitable company in history - will come to an end. Apple only has its hardware play in that picture. The only software/services play that Apple was able to expand in that diagram was iTunes so they took a tiny target of the opportunity and became a big fish in the smallest pond there was. Apple needs to think about where they go and how.

The App Stores are not it and the App Store will never be it. (All app stores combined across all smartphones, were only worth about 1% of the total telecoms revenues last year. That is yes, not 1% of the Grand Convergence diagram, its 1% only of the Telecoms arrow. That is not nothing. Its less than nothing. If it wasn't for so many tech writers being iSheep and believing all the iBullshit, they'd notice by now that the app store myth is only viable for videogaming - another of the smallest arrows in the diagram. After you remove gaming there is no sustainable economy in app stores for the developers. But we knew that here on this blog for many years now, as I've been calculating the math and economics of that waste of digital space) 

Apple is the most profitable company now, It cannot maintain the profit levels when Macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads become victims of commoditization of their box-mover industries. Wristwatches are not the savior. Apple had a chance to be a big player in the smartphone wars but lost to Google's Android. Now they face a destiny of becoming a marginalized player on the fringe with maybe 10% market share in 5 years. Thats nice but it will be the area where most developers won't bother to go and where Apple is locked into its own alteranate reality where everybody has to follow Apple's rules. It is not conducive to winning in this competition. And Apple does have to make its moves fast, it is now sitting on obscene piles of cash which should be used wisely now, as opportunities are abundant. Not as defensive plays five years from now when the best chances are gone. Oh and incidentially Apple Pay fails exactly because of the mass market situation. Nobody wants a currency that only works 10% of the time. Sorry Apple, you blew it in the grand contest. But currently you are profitable. I wonder if Apple falls back to the days of 1996 when it was months from bankruptcy. There is no guarantee in the HARDWARE business that is so rapidly becoming commoditized as Apple's current products are. Apple needs a software-service play into this future to survive.

Apple's world domination 'cunning plan' is of course the virtual SIM card (that we now see on the new iPads and Apple tried to bring to the iPhone). That would be the ultimate Apple trick and it would wipe out the operators because Apple could then become a virtual operator and sell its customer connectivity to the lowest bidder. This would be exceptionally damaging to international data roaming business where telecoms operators make a disproportionate share of their total profits. That is what Apple is trying and will keep on trying. The carrier community stood united to prevent the virtual SIM card from the iPhone but they were not able to stop it coming to the iPad. It wil be the game to watch. If the operators/carriers lose their lock on the SIM card, they have lost the game and will become nothing but low-cost bit-pipes.

MICROSOFT

So then the Evil Empire. Whats Microsoft up to? Well, they were at one point the biggest player from the computer industry and for much of the past decades have been the most profitable of that industry. They did see mobile coming early on, Bill Gates launched Microsoft into the mobile OS wars and Windows Mobile at its peak was the world's second most used OS on smartphones with 12% market share (slightly less than the level where iPhone currently is in 2014 - if you want a warning from history haha).

Steve Ballmer then threw all that away with his silliness starting with 'no migration path' (why on earth not, after Microsoft - which managed to migrate DOS users to Windows on the PC, how could that same Microsoft make such an elementary blunder). So today Windows Phone OS has under 3% market share of new sales, and all those phones were essentially given away - sold at a loss - and even after that we just heard last year that one in three Windows based smartphones had never been activated (likely most were simply manufactured, shipped to retail and never sold). So the real market share for Windows in smartphones is dismal now, at 2%. It is the most toxic of any 'ecosystems' and developers are abandoning the sinking ship. It is now only a question of time when will Nadella shut down (or sell) the Lumia unit.

What can Microsoft do, if it owned the computer 'arrow' through a Billion Windows PC desktops, then failed in joining the march from the PC to mobile? Microsoft is doomed to try to live 'on the outside'. Thats weird. So yeah, on desktops they are big, they are less big on laptops. They are horridly bad on tablets (Windows has 5%) and dead on smartphones (2% by selling at a loss). A tablet is an ultra-portable PC, it is not a 'mobile' device because we typically cannot operate the device while we move or are in movement. We can't use the tablet (connected) in a taxi or bus for example, and it needs two hands to use it, so as Gary Schwartz explained in his book Fast Shopper Slow Store, 'tablets immobilize people.' We have to stop when we start to use a tablet. But a phone we can use while we walk, we can continue the conversation or send a message or take a picture etc including using the phone comfortably with one hand, with something valuable on the other hand, such as our briefcase or the hand of our child.

So Microsoft was big on the internet, it destroyed Netscape and for a while Internet Exploder was the most used browser. That should have been a lesson to Microsoft. Their Evil Empire antics were so hated that as soon as we had a Chrome or Firefox we jumped away from IE. So even on its 'internet play' Microsoft messed it up. Where else are they strong? Gaming. But note, 45% of gaming has gone mobile. Microsoft XBox represents exactly like Windows on the PC, only the legacy dying part that is not mobile. Microsoft has no play on the mobile side of gaming. Once again they are left standing on the station while the train has pulled away. It is very difficult to see the end to your business if the industry you're in is still growing. Just ask Minolta or Polaroid or Konica.

So what of Skype then? This is the true test of CEO Nadella. He will sell or shut down the Lumia ex-Nokia handset unit soon anyway (I give it about 2 at best 3 years) but Skype prevents Microsoft from ever entering the overall mobile race. Skype was perhaps a smart move by Ballmer when considering Microsoft's rapidly depleted options to play in the internet game. They got Skype but it bit them in the ass. Skype then killed Microsoft in mobile. This is a true modern case of a Pyrrhic victory. Yes Skype is now the most used telephone voice calling service. But it was the reason why Windows Phone was comprehensively shut out of the mobile opportunity by the global carrier community. Don't believe me? Ask Elop, the ex CEO of Nokia, when he was still CEO of Nokia. Elop said that not just Nokia brand but all smartphones sold globally that carried Windows OS, were being boycotted by the carrier community. Not because they HAD Skype - they did NOT and rivals from iOS to Android did have Skype - the reason Windows OS was boycotted globally was because Microsoft had bought Skype, the single existential threat to the operator/carrier business at the time. Elop used the word 'of course' to underline how well this fact was known in the industry, when he asnwered a question from an investor at Nokia's annual shareholder meeting. Of course there was a global sales boycott against all Windows based smartphones, not just Nokia. It is why Sony quit Windows and went Android. Its why LG quit Windows and went Android. Its why Motorola quit Windwos and went Android. Its why Dell quit Windows and went Android. Its why Nokia itself rushed Android based smartphones to the market after they dumped Elop from the post of CEO as Nokia was seling the handset unit to Microsoft.

Skype did give Microsoft a big reach into the digital user base beyond Windows on the desktop. Skype is increasingly used on smartphones (also now on Windows Phone). As we all know, we can use Skype totally free (where it is not blocked) for basic calls between Skype users and then there are lots of premium services if you want something like for example a phone number active in the USA, or to call special numbers outside the Skype network itself. Skype of course also offers videcalling and direct messaging so it the only global 'triple threat' to the carrier business threatening voice calls, SMS text messaging and videocalls. And it is most used for international calls where much of voice call revenues and proftits are made in telecoms. But is Skype profitable? Most years, no. It might make a teeny-weeny profit maybe now, but nothing of the scale Microsoft used to have and could have had if it had even a modest but sustainable business in mobile. A true pyrrhic victory. Microsoft was able to regain a big footprint on the internet but in an area that is mostly on the fixed side/desktop side and one that then eliminated their chances in mobile. If Nadella suddenly sells Skype, that is the day we could say is the rebirth of Microsoft and they may have a chance inside the circle of Grand Convergence. Now they are destined to roam in the ever more bleak wilderness outside the circle. Meanwhile for the industry, Microsoft is not now the Evil Empire, its more like a suicide bomber terrorist, who uses Skype to blow itself up, while taking much of the (mobile operator core) community of this industry to death with its own suicide. Nice job Microbrains! We hate you, go die somewhere else!

Talking about hate, how's that Windows Phone OS doing for you Microsoft? Remember Sony? Darling Sony who once made Windows based smartphones and sold them happily? Well, after Skype, Sony quit selling Windows based smartphones but it still sold Vaio branded laptops running Windows for the desktop. And so some Microbrain went and bribed Sony to agree to return to Windows on smartphones. Sony took the Microsoft 'bribe' ie partnership enticement marketing bullshit money, and promised they'd not launch consumer smarthpones that they sold now successfully on Android under the Xperia brand, but some enterprise-oriented smartphones on the Vaio brand, yeah, sure, that made sense. There was arguably some synergy to that. So yeah. Sony announced that in 2013. Then they went and sold the Vaio unit. 

So how dead is Windows Phone OS for smartphones? Sony had prior experience with Windows OS for smartphones. Its Vaio brand laptop business unit is now an independent company. It is a 100% Windows house. If ever - EVER - there was honest real synergy and business sense for ANY company to launch Windows based smartphones, it would be the Vaio unit, that knows Windows on smartphones, and currently sells Windows based PCs and who had been developing a Windows based smartphone for a year. What did Vaio just announce? That their Vaio branded smartphones to run alongside Windows based Vaio laptops will run... Android. Windows is so dead its not even funny. In ten years Windows is as relevant to high tech as Cobol and Fortran are today. And in smartphones Windows OS today is as viable as IBM's System 360 mainframe computers (which BTW celebrates 50 years this year, congrats IBM for the worlds' first modular standardized computer system that ran standard computer languages.. When I studied computer programming the industry was known as IBM and the Bunch where IBM literally made half of the money. Fleeting is such fame, Apple iFans beware)

FACEBOOK

So then we have FB (what, is Facebook not dead yet?). Yeah a kind of tech darling and obviously the biggest of the social networking industry. Social networking is a child of the internet industry but its now a separate industry because we can have pure social networking companies outside of the internet such as social networks built on mobile (like say SMSall of Pakistan that runs on SMS) or the bluetooth social media networks like Firechat we heard about during Hong Kong's umbrella protests. So Social Media is its own legitimate category. And as we know, Facebook like just about every social media player didn't find its profits until it came to the 'dark side' of mobile haha. Exactly as I wrote in my book about mobile social networks haha (Pearls Vol 2: Mobile Social Networks). So where is Facebook? Its dabbling in advertising and looking for places to invest in or to play in. Its big play was Whatsapp which makes it the biggest independent messaging platform as an OTT (Over The Top) provider. Whatsapp just passed 700 million active users. That is bigger than any carrier/operator in the world except China Mobile, and if we count the OTT players, then ranks them fourth behind Skype, Facebook and China Mobile. Yes Whatsapp alone is the fourth biggest network provider. And it generates now messages at 30 Billon per day so Whatsapp alone is now bigger than total SMS text messaging traffic on the planet (even as SMS has 8 times bigger user base). Obviously Whatsapp and Facebook overall have tiny reveues compared to SMS globally.

(oh did you ask? 110 Billion dollars roughly for 2014, a little bit down from its peak in 2013 but yeah, SMS is by far the biggest messaging system on the planet 3 times bigger than email, 4 times bigger than Facebook and 8 times bigger than Whatsapp by number of active users in 2014. SMS isn't about to die any day soon. Only its peak profits and peak revenues are now past. Its still a very healthy global juggernaut four times bigger than the global cinema industry for example. Yes SMS text messaging.)

What does Facebook want out of this Grand Convergence? They seem to be adrift with no real focus or plan. They are not unlike what Yahoo has been on the internet side. Think about it. Google didn't do anything in secret. Yahoo watched right next door what they were doing and today we have Google and Yahoo two utterly differtent directions. One owns the future and the other is on a one-way ticket to oblivion. Facebook yes has Whatsapp but then what? Where is their vision. Remember that failed phone? Yeah as smart as Amazon launching its own phone. Wait, Amazon did launch its own phone haha. (so you think I love the Kodak phone or Polaroid phone now? After the Microsoft Kin and Google Nexus and Amazon Fire and (HTC) Facebook phone. No, Kodak and Polaroid won't succeed in this either. Not the way they are going about it. But thats for another blog).

SAMSUNG

So then there is the biggest tech company on the planet right now, Samsung. A dubious position as we can recall how many others once were there, like HP, IBM, Sony, Microsoft haha. But yeah, Samsung is more than twice as big as Apple in total sales across all of their businesses. In Smartphones Samsung sells about 50% more annually than Apple (dont' be fooled by the end-of-year numbers when Apple always has its best annual quarter, thats because Apple launches its new phones for Christmas sales, we have to consider Apple total smartphone market always on an annual cycle not a quarterly cycle). In all phones sold (including dumbphones) Sammy is about twice hte size of Apple's iPhone. Samsung also sells TVs and semiconductors and all sorts of other gadgets and tech. But its a curious company considering the Grand Convergence, Samsung has in the past seemed to be singularly inept at leaping across the industries with any 'synergy'. Take screens. Samsung is the world's largest TV maker and largest smartphone maker and semiconductor provider. It has also sold personal computers for more than a decade. Why is Samsung not the world's largest (or a Top 3) sized PC maker? Weird, isn't it?

This is quite different from say how Apple operates. Apple has been able to 'invade' other areas where it finds partial synergies - the iPod was a very simplified computer/media player partly taking functions from the Newton and just minimizing it. But while pundits of the music industry compared the iPod to Walkman cassette players and thought Apple had no synergies, actually the chips and codecs and memory of the iPod were computer industry gear, just repurposed by Apple. Yes an iPod is a basic and task-optimized pocket computer or call it a variation of the PDA. So its not as wild a jump technically for Apple as it seemed or would have been if Apple launched a cassette-tape player against the Sony Walkman haha.

Then Apple is able to gain dominance in the areas where it expands for a while. Best example iPad obviously. But no. Samsung seems to ignore its corporate strengths, never use any synergies to support its divisions and only manage to grow within a given industry. Like becoming the biggest player in televisions or phones or semiconductors. This is not unlike Sony, which is another company utterly inept at taking advantage of almost any of its vast array of brands and technologies to expand a given unit's business (the original Walkman branded musicphones are the main exception).

Why dont' we have a Playstation smartphone running Android? Or why are Sony's smartphones very ho-hum in cameras while Sony owns the Cybershot camera brand? Why is Samsung able to boast the best cameraphones far outclassing Sony. It makes no sense. And bear in mind, Gangnam sits in the meccha of digital convergence in Seoul, the most connected city in the most connected country where the kind of digital convergence exists today that most only dream about. As I said, I wrote the book on it, Digital Korea as the first case study of Grand Convergence on a national level. So Samsung R&D can see the digital converged future in their daily lives when they step outside their offices. How can they so miss this opportunity? It baffles the mind

But at least Samsung has been trying. The software play was once strong and serious with bada released and Tizen on the pipeline. Now Tizen has had what, six delays to its launch for two years and the OS seems to become stillborn. We have only seen two smart watches on Tizen (that then inexplicably were annoucned to be Osborned and Samsung would return to Android for future Galaxy Gear smartwatches? WTF?) Now we see Tizen on some TVs and there should be or might be a Tizen smartphone launched (fingers crossed) in India maybe later this Spring, who knows. But yeah, Sammy did try to go where the logical expansion is for a major handset maker. When the PC era went to box-moving at slim margins, it was Microsoft the OS provider who made all the profits and the box-mover PC makers lived in a razor-thin margin if it was a good year. Most years they reported losses. And it led to huge consolidation. That is what the future of digital convergence looks to Samsung. The saving grace for Sammy compared to Apple is one word: scale. As long as Samsung remains the world's largest tech provider then they have the cushion of scale and should outperform other box movers in the mass marekt space like LG and Sony and the various Chinese players. That is a different business than a niche market (Apple) where bigger profits are possible. If Samsung remains only a handset/tablet/TV equipmetn maker, they are facing a slow long decline into becoming what Dell became in the PC world. Would investors love to hear of profit margins in a good quarter of 2%? Samsung is now huge and has deep pockets, it should now move beyond the boxes and use its insights and broad range of assets to find something next.

They don't seem to know what they are doing though. The Tizen mess is a perfect synopsis of how clueless Samsung is at the top. They simply don't know where to go or what to do. When Nokia was on the top, say what you will about their delays but Nokia had a clear vision and pursued bravely the first gaming phones and the 'multimedia computers' and the consumer smartphone space and app stores and mobile payments and industry-best cameraphones and mobile advertising and music and ultra-low-cost smartphones and NFC and mobile wallets etc (all literally years before Apple got around to doing it, or in most cases also years before Google got to it. This all was that old Nokia before Elop killed it ail).

Consider Apple and Samsung. Five years from now there will be devices that are still clearly 'smartphones' and 'tablets' and that hardware will still be a 300 Billion dollar industry plus/minus 33%. But 15 years from now the smartphone and tablet will be as quaint as a stand-alone telephone answering machine with its two cassette tapes haha. Or a VCR (Betamax or VHS? haha, real men had both!). Yes some connectivity gadgets will exist but the form factor of the 'phone' will be gone in 15 years. We may have some gadget embedded into our bodies but then if its digestible, how can anyone even see that cool iPhone 23 that is just a chip under my skin or embedded inside my tooth? Some tech is needed, say cars, trains, airplanes, ships. Some tech becomes totally obsolete like telegraphs, fax machines, zeppelins, telephone answering machines. The smartphone metaphor device and the tablet metaphor device - these are not sustainable. They will shrink and vanish. Not completely but so much that there isn't enough of a hardware business to bother with. In year 2030 the 'hardware' business of the portable pocketable digital connection device will not be as big as a third of today, at best at $100 Billion dollars in today's money (inflation-corrected). It might not even be as little as 10 Bililon haha. That is a comprehensive collapse of this slice of the industry. 

Yes there will be hardware but mostly it will be embedded or wearable and it will be miniscule. And it will be dirt-cheap. Did you read the blog I did of the analysis of the 10 dollar smartphone by 2020? Think through what that means? It does mean that we will buy other 'smartphones' and 'tablets' in 2025 like we would want to buy a CRT-based black-and-white TV set today. Yes it can be made but nobody would buy it. Apple will probably migrate to ever more luxury and fashion lifestyle products (led by Apple Watch) so they might be a jewelry brand by 2030 wth some semi-high tech thrown in. But Samsung will be the biggest box-mover who sits at the slimmest profit marging sustainable pushing its Chinese and Indian rivals to zero-profit quarters while occasionally buying one of the other giant rivals - much how HP kept being the biggest PC maker for so long, Buying up its rivals.

ULTIMATE RACE

So we are witnessing the biggest race of human history. This converged industry today when the 17 industries are measured separately, are worth 7 Trillion dollars. The migraiton to mobile has hit 1.7 Trillion dollars according to Chetan Sharma's 2014 number so we are about one quarter of the way to the end-state. We've seen some giants fall but this is a death-match. There will be huge deaths to come in the next 15 years and most of the winners in this race will be majors within this circle today. The operators are at the driver's seat as long as they can hold onto the SIM card as key to our digital connection. The carrier community would be wse to adopt as much tech into the SIM card and make it as indispensble as they possibly can, from what Estonia did with IDs to what South Korea did with the banking industry. And if Apple ever breaks that SIM lock to the consumers and gets their virtual SIM into the market, then the carriers/operators will become toast.

Google is the only definite winner so far with a nepharious plan to bypass the operators and get into every pocket. But differing from the operators, innovation is in Google's DNA. They kill off more live Google products than what carriers/operators can even imagine in their innovation workshops haha.

Microsoft was one of the strongest players but is now exiled to the outside. Apple has been brilliant when the early stages were hardware, they now have to do the same on the software/services side. They have the DNA to also succeed reinventing services and software, look at iTunes and the Apple Store but its not the App Store. Apple has to now do something radical and new, beyond Apple Watch in hardware or the futile bid of Apple Pay when only 10% of consumers would ever have that payment instrument. Its as stupid as a TV station releasing a TV show that is only visible on Sony branded TVs haha.

Facebook is lost but at least they are perhaps on the path having discovered the money in mobile. Who knows. Samsung is huge but their synergies are hopeless and their software and services record is spelled bada - something Samsung itself killed off. Tizen is the test of is there more to Samsung than hardware at thin profit margins.

There are tons of other players, Intel, IBM, Sony, BBC, Yahoo, Amazon, Turner, Time-Warner, WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, LG, the Chinese tech brands and internet brands from Baidu to Xiaomi; EA, Warner, Universal, Visa, Amex, Citibank (even Nokia on a comeback?) etc. Some of them will be driven by a visionary CEO who will be called the next Steve Jobs, who will make a bold brave move to another industry within Grand Convergence, like how Apple the PC maker launched iPod music players and the iTunes music store. Might we see an American Express smartphone? MIght we see Yahoo Insurance? A BBC internet service? There is gold inside the circle of Grand Convergence. We have only made one quarter of the journey. The biggest prizes are mostly still hidden and will come in the next 10-15 years. Who will be brave and bold to get there? Who will stumble along the way. Will we still identify brands that are now known as mobile operators/carriers by 2030 or have they vanished from our daily lives not unlike the water provider or electricity provider to our homes and offices today?

This is the richest time for innovaiton in human history and the Grand Convergence theory is your map to the future. There are enormous riches here to be had but also vast dangerous pitfalls that will imperil foolish companies. Print out the Grand Convergence map and frame it on your wall and save it on your phone and use it wisely. Imagine being an explorer who is suddenly given a map to where you want to go. This is that opportunity. Come back to the blog where I will review the Grand Convergence from time to time. We may have 18 industries in it next time we meet... 

PS Grand Convergence is of course one of the main themes I will cover in my big workshop in Dubai in May if you want to send someone from your team to catch a full workshop with me.

 

Some Smartphone Sanity Please! Xiaomi is nice for China but its not the New Apple and it will not take over the world. There are at least 4 stronger Chinese phone manufacturers

I hate the sloppy analysis and writing we get, particularly from the USA about mobile. Once again they chase the latest 'shiny object' mesmerized by some nonsense numbers totally ignorant of how the mobile industry works. Yes, Xiaomi has had a wonderful year in China. Yes it was momentarily the largest smartphone maker in China and yes it was even very briefly the third largest smartphone maker in the world (for literally only two weeks, not more). It is utterly silly to call them the third largest smartphone maker today - check the numbers, it is a fact that Xiaomi for full year 2014 cannot finish higher than 5th ranking. We have already seen enough numbers from Samsung, Apple, Lenovo+Motorola and Huawei, to know the official 61.1 million smartphones that Xiaomi sold in 2014 cannot give them a rank of more than 5th largest smartphone manufacturer for the year. Cannot be higher. Anyone calling them third biggest only illustrates that the writer failed math in high school.

XIAOMI IS NO APPLE

Lets talk about Chinese handset vendors. About 70% of all phones sold on the planet were manufactured in China, most of them in the metropolitan sprawl of Shenzhen just across the border from Hong Kong where about 25 million people live (Hong Kong's population is a mere 7 million). China has not one or two or five phone brands, it has... over 2,000 phone brands. Yes. Two THOUSAND domestic phone brands. So you like Xiaomi the Little Rice company? Good for you. Now lets look at the global market just for a moment.

Success in the global phone market depends on 'carrier relationships' with the mobile operator telecoms companies who have to approve handsets into their markets. In addition to that, you have to have local distribution, in some countries that goes mostly through the operators/carriers, in other markets the handsets are sold independent of the carriers/operators. But in any case, you as the newcomer mobile phone manufacturer have to establish the carrier relationships to get your cool new phones approved for a given country, per carrier, and you then have to also find distributors willing to buy your devices and try to sell them. In smartphones the 10 biggest global brands control nearly 80% of the global market. If you are Xiaomi, a brand no consumer customer has ever heard of in Kenya or Argentina or Belgium or Thailand, you have to market and push that brand to achieve some interest so that the retailers are even willing to carry your product.

Take Apple. They are one of the most recognized tech brands on the planet. They were alrady selling Macintosh PCs and iPod music players in all countries when they launched the iPhone in 2007. It took them literally six years to reach most carriers/operator in most countries to approve and start to sell the iPhone. And Xiaomi has never sold any other tech before phones, in any countries. It is not in any way comparable to as good the position Apple had for expanding iPhone sales beyond America from 2007. Xiaomi has to start from scratch in every single country. It is an absolute definite concrete fact, that if Apple achieved global footprint in about 7 years, Xiaomi brand alone cannot do it as fast. It can, at best, acchieve that in maybe 10 years. This, with the assumption Xiaomi does not buy some other brand like Chinese Lenovo which bought Motorola last year or Chinese TCL which bought the Palm brand just now.

WHO ARE THE BIG THREATS?

Xiaomi sold 61.1 million smartphones in 2014. That gives them about 4.9% market share of the global smartphone market. They had a peak Quarterly market share of 5.6% in Q3 of 2014 but that has already come down to 4.4% for the Christmas Quarter, Q4 of 2014. Yes, Xiaomi quarterly market share had peaked. It is in decline. Huawei has definitely passed Xiaomi to be (temporarily at least) larger as a Chinese smartphone manufacturer in Q4 and we haven't even gotten the Lenovo numbers yet. The handset industry is extremely volatile, one hit phone can temporarily push you to a Top 3 ranking for one quarter and then drop you down into the pack the very next quarter. Just ask LG and Sony and Huawei about it in the past two years, or HTC, Blackberry and Nokia over the previous two years.

Xiaomi sells significantly only in China. Its next biggest market is India where it has sold an unimpressive 1 million phones. Yes. Its second best market is India, where Xiaomi sells 1 million phones per year. And other than India, Xiaomi does not even register in any other markets yet. So its journey is at literally the starting point. But the hot phones it had in 2014 are going to be utterly obsolete by 2015, so its now dependent on luck, will Xiaomi achieve some kind of 'Razr Moment' with its next phone or was the year 2014 only an 'Xperia Moment' for Xiaomi, like Sony briefly surged to a Top 3 ranking and made big profits with the Xperia until the rivals killed it and Sony was plunged into loss-making.

In the global market you need carrier-relations. That is the lesson that Apple learned, that Microsoft learned with its Kin, what Nokia's new CEO Stephen Elop learned when his darling, the Lumia series failed globally, and what Google learned with the Nexus. It is what all insiders in mobile know. The handset market is not like the PC market or the gaming console market or the TV market. The handset market is dependent on the good will of the carrier community. And to achieve that, you have to get your phones approved by over 600 moblie operators in over 200 countries globally. Each operator/carrier individually and each country by country. There is no shortcut. If you are an Apple, then maybe you can do this in 7 years. If you are a normal tech company it takes more like 10-15 years. So all that utterly silly reporting by American 'experts and pundtis' about Xiaomi, lets now forget that. Xiaomi will not have 10% to 15% market share at the end of this year. Utterly silly. Xiaomi may have 4%-6% market share at the end of this year 2015. Who are the real global Chinese makers?

LENOVO AND MOTOROLA

The strongest Chinese brand is Lenovo with its Motorola acquisition. Lenovo alone in 2015 sold more smartphones than Xiaomi. Lenovo was selling millions in Russia and India and several other markets already last year, before they bought the Motorola business from Google. Now Lenovo adds the Motorola brand to its Chinese market - putting pressure to Xiaomi, as Motorola is a well trusted US brand of high price points in China. But far more importantly, Motorola brings to Lenovo a Top 3 brand position in handsets in the USA, Latin America and at least a Top 5 phone brand position in many parts of Africa Asia and Europe. Lenovo and Motorola combined sold something close to 100 million smartphones in 2014, far more than Xiaom but much more importantly. they weren't dependent on one hit phone in one country. Lenovo was already buildling a signifciant footprint before the Motorola deal and now has a big global footprint to sell smartphones, and differing from all other Chinese rivals I will mention here who also have an international sales presence, only Lenovo with Motorola is 100% smartphones. The other Chinese brands have to migrate some proportion of their customer base from dumbphones to smartphones (Google completed the Motorola migration from dumbpones to all-smartphones already two years ago)

HUAWEI

The second strongest Chinese smartphone brand is not Xiaomi either, it is Huawei. Huawei is one of the world's largesty telecoms equipment vendors. They sell networking equiipment like Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia (Networks, the part that is left of Nokia after they sold their handset business to Microsoft last year). Huawei is also a major handset vendor, ranked 4th largest handset vendor in the world when both dumbphones and smartphones are included. Huawei sells about twice as many handsets as Xiaomi but far more importantly, Huawei has a global distribution network already selling very successfully for example in Africa. Huawei's smartphone business alone is larger than Xiaomi's total business, selling 75 million smartphones. But understand, as the prices of smartphones keep falling, there is the remaining dumbphone business .Huawei has which is about 60 million units per year, which it can stil migrate to Huawei branded smartphone customers. Maybe they won't achieve 1-on-1 transition, as few brands were ever able to do that but even if they convert half of that into smartphone customers Huawei would be easily 50% bigger than Xiaomi just in the smartphone business, ignoring Huawei's other businesses like its telecoms networking business.

TCL - ALCATEL - RCA - PALM

Then there is TCL. Chinese TCL went into partnership with French telecoms vendor in 2004 to build a Chinese factory to build low-cost handsets for the world. Alcatel sold its share of the business to TCL later and today this Chinese manufacturer is a Top 10 handset maker who have passed the half-point of migrating their customers from dumbphones to smartphones. The TCL-Alcatel brand in phones is a major player in Mexico, Venezuela, Russia etc. This company believes in using various brands to expand its presence so it sells smartphones for example in the USA under the RCA brand. And just a few weeks ago it bought rights to sell smartphones using the Palm brand, from Hewlett-Packard. TCL total handset volume is on par with Xiaomi but only about two thirds of TCL sales is smartphones. But it has a global footprint and several strong brands. TCL smatphone volume is currently about 40 million so its smaller than Xiaomi but TCL can sell in most countries. Which do you think has a better chance of growing in 2015? Xiaomi which saw its market share FALL in the fourth quarter, or TCL which has been building a global business for ten years now and has about 3% of the global handset market. TCL is definitely the stronger player than Xiaomi, for a global industry.

ZTE

Then we have Huawei's cross-town rival, ZTE. Like Huawei ZTE also provides telecoms networking equipment, and like Huawei, ZTE sells dumbphones and smartphones. In size, ZTE is a bit smaller than Xiaomi when counting just smartphones, and a bit larger if we count all phones. But ZTE has been selling to telecoms operators/carriers worldwide for 15 years and has a worldwide footprint. ZTE doesn't own any premium brands like slightly-smaller TCL does but ZTE has a good networking business to help it open doors to carriers/operators. ZTE is at least as strong a bet as Xiaomi is for growth in smartphones.

COOLPAD/YULONG

And lastly there is Coolpad ie Yulong. This is a pure domestic smartphone brand like Xiaomi and 2,000 other domestic Chinese phone brands. But Coolpad entered the global Top 10 before Xiaomi did and started its global expansion some months before Xiaomi did. Yes, Coolpad is currently a bit smaller than Xiaomi but sells similar products in similar price points and has just about as much share in China currently. Rivals like Coolpad - there are dozens in the immediate next tier - will pressure Xiaomi in its domestic market and rush with Xiaomi to capture the nearby international markets like India, Pakistan, Russia, Vietnam, etc.

Xiaomi will not take over the world and 'be anotehr Apple'. If any Chinese brand will have a breakout year in 2015 that is going to be Lenovo, the only brand that has the chances to leapfrog the normal growth rate. Xiaomi will barely grow in 2015 because its domestic rivals hamper its chances at home and its international expansion has barely begun. Huawei and TCL wil grow much more in 2015 because of their international footprints and ZTE and Coolpad are just as likely to grow at Xiaomi-rates in 2015 as Xiaomi. I would not be surprised if Xiaomi's roughly 5% market share will shrink in the next year. It will definitely be nothing near 8%, if they get 6% it would be a banner year for Xiaomi.

Lets be real about the smartphone market and lets not push these nonsense fairy tales. American pundits and analysts are pretty clueless when it comes to the international phone market. Xiaomi the littel rice company will not take over the world of smartphones in the coming few years. Mark my words. I am the most accurate forecaster of the handset indsutry haha.

PS if you want to know the numbers of the handset industry read the brand new TomiAhonen Phone Book 2014.

Some Smartphone Market Updates - Xiaomi, Huawei, Blackberry, Palm, TCL-Alcatel, Lamborghini

So we start to collect the last quarter and full year 2014 numbers and have some other issues also to report. Lets look at a few brands who've given their final numbers.

Huawei reported their full year 2014 number was 75 million smartphones sold. I count from that, that their Q4 sales were 24.4 millino and 6%. Their full year preliminary market share is also 6% and their likely final annual ranking is 4th or 3rd depending on Lenovo's final number.

Xiaomi reported full year 2014 to be 61.1 million. That gives them Q4 numbers of 17.0 million and 4% market share. For full year they are at about 5%.Xiaomi's full year ranking 2014 may be as high as 5th depending on the others in the mid-field like ZTE, LG, Sony, Coolpad etc. So we'll monitor this space.

Blackberry reported 1.9 million smartphones sold for Q4 but their Q4 ends in November so it does not include December sales. But roughly speaking they are so tiny they are falling out of the Top 20.. For the full year they shipped (December 2013 - Novermber 2014) only a meager 9.0 million smartphones so they have about 0.7% market share.

Some other interesting notes. HP has sold the Palm brand to TCL of China (who also own the Alcatel brand). Wow, this is almost perfectly in line wth the stuff I just wrote about that the Chinese players want to expand abrroad and find their own brands not strong enough and yes, TCL has now bought back the Palm brand gosh for its what, 4th life? Palm is like a cat that can't be killed haha..

If you thought 600 dollars was way too little to spend on a phone and even the 4,000 dollars that the first Laborghini smartphone (running Android of course) cost, now Lambo has just released their latest model that costs haha... 6,000 dollars. Yeah, real leather for exanple in the casing for example. I saw a prototype late last year and wow, it is massive and impressive (phablet screen size of course). If you really want to out-bling the iPhone, consider the Lamborghini? Six grand for a phone that is not gold and does not have diamonds etc.. just the Lamborghini looks and bling to it..

Oh remember when Sony sold its loss-making Vaio PC unit last year? Well guess who'se about to join the smartphone wars. Yes, Vaio has just announced they are going to launch Android based smartphones. So who is the real Sony haha..

Ok more updates as we find them and of course full end-of-year 2014 and Q4 market stats coming when we have all the data in (expect early to mid Feb 2015)

Updating Progress on the 'Recreate iPhone of 2010 for $10 by 2020' Projection - Yes we are perfectly on track still in December 2014 so yes by 2020 you'll get a good spec smartphone for ten dollars (Revised)

Those who've seen me speak in public have probably seen this slide ever since I first showed it in 2010 from Johannesburg to Sao Paulo to San Diego to Helsinki to Hong Kong. I promised that we could take the specs of the then-topmost superphones like the iPhone, and recreate those specs by year 2020 for only ten US dollars and still sell profitably. This is that slide:

(NOTE this blog article was updated the next day with better example, see below)




And those who have seen me speak recently have almost always seen that slide as well. I used Moore's Law and projected that the final price of those specs - so a 3.5 inch touch screen smartphone with 8mp camera and flash, WiFi and GPS, on 3G connectivity - and promised those specs would only cost US $10.00 to sell including marketing and profit, by year 2020. This price is without any handset subsidy. Note that I also projected the mileposts by 18 month intervals, so we can monitor this 'theory' to see if it turns out to be true. Would be wonderful, wouldn't it, if every economically viable person on the planet could by year 2020 own the pocket marvel internet camera media video news and computing machine that was the iPhone of 2010 (or whatever superphone you preferred then be it Nokia N8 or Blackberry Bold or Samsung Galaxy etc). The specs of the topmost phone of the time. I used the iPhone specs as a good balance 'compromise' among the different choices. 

Well, that theory suggests quite a massive milestone on December 2014. Those specs should now be available on some smartphone for the first time for well under $100. The theory says we should be able to buy those specs on some smartphone for 75 dollars. Lets see if there is such a marvel somewhere.

UPDATED VERSION:

On 6 January I returned to the blog and found the comment by DarwinPhish (see below in comments) that the phone I had found was in fact an older model that was discounted. While that is still valid, to some extent, if Moore's Law holds true, we have to also find NEW phones that fit the theory, not just old stock being sold perhaps at severe discounts. So I went back to search and found this instaed (I have left the old text here if you wanted it, below). So the NEW phone I found is:

So I found (on my second try) the iBall Tiger phone from India, a local brand. Its a smartphone running Android and the iBall Tiger 4h Tiger+ has these specs: 4 inch touch screen, 3G, WiFi, 8mp camera and flash, GPS. And its price is 4,590 INR or 72 US dollars. So there, exactly on schedule we match all the specs of the iPhone 4 from 2010. So yeah, sorry about the first phone I found being an older model (and thanks DarwinPhish for telling me, obviously I don't know every India phone model and when they were released haha) but this is a new phone released in October 2014 and yes, it costs 72 US dollars in India and it matches all the specs I required from 2010. The theory holds.


(IF you want to read the original paragraph with the older Byond brand smartphone it is here)
I didn't have to look far and I am guessing this is not even the ultimate match but its close enough. In India a local brand smartphone called Byond sells the Byond 63 which has these specs: 4.5 inch touch-screen (better than I promised) plus 8mp camera and flash, WiFi and 3G, GPS, all running on Android. And the cost is 4,500 Indian Rupees. Is that 75 dollars? No, its only 71 dollars.


We are (again) ahead of my schedule and I can confirm that the theory is perfectly on track. By year 2020 we can buy some smartphone that replicates the specs of the top superphones of 2010, and that phone will be sold for ten US dollars including marketing and profit. Wow, this is good news for the planet. It will be the smartphone that finally bridges the digital divide for the planet. Isn't this a great industry to be in? (BTW if you need more info on the phones across the Digital Divide, I give you the latest 2014 stats here).